The Pause

There are some things for which life stands still; death is chief among them.

We lost my mother-in-law yesterday. Karen had been ill with cancer for months. At Christmastime she was still fighting, hoping to come home & maybe live a year or even a few more months. She never got well enough to come home.

Doug & I drove down to Massachusetts on Friday, after his brother called to say she was failing. She was heavily medicated for pain but we were able to say "I love you" one more time. My nephew was briefly home from the Army base where he works; shortly after he said his goodbye, she passed, almost as though she had been waiting.

Her sons, my husband and my brother-in-law, were both very close to her. I loved Karen, too; she made me part of the family from the very start. Grief is a dreadful weight and yet as the price we pay for love, it's a bargain.

Some people process grief through making, but it doesn't work that way for me. All my impulses to create dry up, because everything seems so trivial. I know from experience that this feeling does not last forever, but while I am in it, it feels like it should; that the return to normalcy is the illusion, the drawing of the curtain over the reality of the insignificance of life. I want to draw the curtain, but I can't. Not yet.

Hug your loved ones, and I'll hug mine. Even knowing that one day we will feel the pain or losing them, or them us, still the love is worth the price.