I have unmitigated and irrefutable, faith.
I don’t always live that way.
I can be controlling AF.
I can think I have all the answers.
I can be stubborn and short-sided.
I can suffer like there’s no tomorrow when things don’t go the way I want them to.
I can take life so seriously that it cripples me.
AND then I remember…
And I remind myself…
Where do you have power?
Where do you need to surrender and trust NOW?
It feels as though I’ve been in a deep dark pit for years now. In truth, it’s been mere months but months can feel like a lifetime when despair takes the wheel. It can feel suffocatingly inescapable.
I don’t know about you… but I blame myself. I shame myself as if that will instantly snap me out of it. I can hear my mother’s words as I type. Her standard battle cry was, “Snap out of it!” Every day that I haven’t I think I’m doing something wrong.
Daddy wanted to die at home.
Hospice came by with pamphlets on the end of life and what to expect.
My siblings flew in from far-flung regions.
I had arrived two weeks earlier upon Daddy’s latest hospital visit.
After his open-heart surgery three years ago, he had been in and out of the ICU continuously.
This latest month-long stint was his breaking point.
His six-foot frame had withered to less than a hundred pounds.
I now know grief.
I now know the heart ache of losing a love of your life.
I now know what it means to long for the sound of your voice.
Or the scent of you. A bouquet of sawdust, old spice, and pipe tobacco.
I now know what it means to crave the sound of your laughter as if it would anchor me.