grief

#609 – Slow Start, Heavy Heart

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This one is going to be short, but emotional. First off, let me say that due to circumstances beyond my control I wasn’t able to get a head start on the things I wrote about yesterday, although I did manage to get other things that were more pressing done. So there’s not that much to write about.

My heart is very heavy tonight. Back on February 13th, I lost a friend of many years to chronic illness. On the 27th, I lost another long-time friend who had been ill for sometime but who experienced a rapid decline in the end. On the morning of the 1st I learned that a third friend – a chosen family member, really, for a couple decades – had lost his long fight to cancer. Before the end of the day I heard that a fourth friend of many years was in hospice care and was not expected to live much longer.

I would not be the person I am today without the influence of these four individuals, and it’s impossible to grieve them individually, as their deaths will have been so very close to one another. My heart and my brain will be treating these four departures as one massive bout of grief, I can already tell. This is going to take me a while to get over.

And I have a final exam in two days.

#578 – Productivity and Devastation

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Today was a busy day. Got laundry done, did some pre-cooking for later in the week, finished an algebra quiz that’s due tomorrow, cleaned up the kitchen a couple of times, got all my usual stuff on my checklist done, watched V for Vendetta (“Remember, remember the fifth of November …”), then settled in for an evening of hanging out on the internet.

This evening my thoughts are in Sutherland Springs, Texas. I cannot fathom what makes a person commit such atrocities and why people defend his right to have the firepower to do it. At what point are we as a country going to stop and say “enough is enough” and take definitive action to prevent this sort of thing from happening again?

My thoughts are also with someone I know who’s a 20-year member of First Baptist Church. Today she slept through her alarm and that likely saved her life and the lives of her kids. I cannot imagine the flood of emotions that she’s experiencing, the pain that she’s going through. I’m devastated for her.

The random, senseless acts of terrorism and violence that seem to be happening every other week nowadays have got to stop, and soon. I wish we knew how.