It's a celebration of and for women. Women who are candid and generous, or generous in the same way I am, which is to say aiming-for-selflessness-and-sometimes-failing, and inclinations toward too much giving so that we are sometimes taken advantage of. That is, women from Planet Earth. And then something happened.

I was invited to give a reading. Before I began, I told the audience what I always tell people before I read from my essays, that a columnist doesn't write in order to convince anyone of anything. We write to figure out how we feel about things. We certainly don't do it for the money. That's a good laugh.

The room was still as I delivered the last lines of an op-ed essay I wrote back in 2003: "My new faith is this: If a woman suffers because her brother, husband, or son might come home prone in a plastic sack, I support her and politics be damned. That's enough certainty to keep me sane through all this."

And then, like an arrow from a bow, a woman shot from the room.

You know that feeling when confidence falls away and, for what seems like forever, you wonder if you've said the wrong thing?

The woman was Anna. She lives in Port Angeles. And, later, while the two of us sat together, she told me this: I lost a nephew in Iraq. My son came home disabled. My third son is about to ship out. If only people knew the complete sacrifice our families make.

A part of me, and it wasn't a small part, wanted to apologize to Anna for reading my essay. You can't do that, another part of me protested, a writer has to be honest or what's the point? I did wonder if there is a rule of etiquette I wasn't aware of when speaking to a mother of a veteran. Was I being insensitive? But, in the end, the only way I know how to enter the surf is to dive right in. There might be a platitude I was supposed to have said, but I'm not good at those kinds of exchanges.

Then I walked away. I still had to drive back to the city, pack, and fly out the next morning from SeaTac. And it's hard to focus on logistics when you want to throw the furniture out the window. Something inside me woke up with a sudden jerk after hearing Anna's story. When you meet a woman living so close to the truth, you feel, which is far more acute than seeing, that, before our boys were soldiers, they were sons rolling down the sidewalk on a skateboard. With moms like Anna.

Which is why I can finally say: Thank you, Anna, for waking me up.

And that I am such a fool. I've grown too used to this war, numb. Now I'm angry again. And this is an anger I want to spread even if some people don't want to hear it. I may never know how hard it is to be the mother of a disabled son or daughter, but I do know the remorse of too much apathy. That night, the drive back to Seattle was eerie. Everything was a sign: There's Civic Field where young soldiers play baseball. There's where they go for pizza after the game. There's the public swimming pool, the elementary school, the bicycle overturned on the front lawn.