Going..

Someone I know is dying. Losing his precious life while the world goes on normally. How can it? Why doesn't everything, shift, stop moving until I've processed, until his wife and children have had time to understand, to deal, to prepare..

But it doesn't work that way. We can't freeze frame moments until we're ready to handle them. This man, Sean, is good and strong and faithful, a husband and a father and a kind soul. He and his family have been an important part of the fabric which is my life.. and now they will experience this great sorrow... How can it be? Why isn't the whole world crying..?

I just don't know what to say. I want to have the right words. the comfort Jen needs. But nothing I say or do can give her back the man she loves, who she is losing minute by precious minute, watching her world change into something she never planned for...Part of me wants to shut out the normalcy as though it is somehow mocking the sacred hours Sean has left...

Why celebrate this season? Why have cake for dessert, watch a funny movie, sing with a little boy at the top of his lungs? Why take comfort in a hug or a good long nap or revel in houses lit up for Christmas?

And yet the Voice inside me whispers, "Why not?" To not celebrate the now, the normalcy, the joys and bright spots in the routine would be to cheapen the value, the preciousness of this life I'm now living, this life that dear Sean is watching end... For in the celebrating in spite of this deep throbbing pain, in spite of the ache, in spite of the sorrow we are saying, "Death where is your victory? Death where is your sting?"

So tonight on the brink of this holy Christmas I will pray for Sean, for Jen, for their little boys to be carried through, I will freely shed tears for them. But also for them, for this world and for the sacred life I have been given will I get up from those prayers and have dessert with my little girl and read a silly book to my baby. I don't think God, or Sean for the matter would have it any other way...