"Lemonade-Makers" Beware.

Today I needed advice, and the only person I felt like I could talk to is gone. I cycle through this scenario about once a day and I still have yet to figure out how to remedy that loss. I could start by waxing poetic about trials and perseverance or gush on about how endurance builds character but the reality is the past six months have been really brutal. After losing one of my favorite people in entire world and a woman I considered to be a second mother, it feels like it's going to take more than just "a few good days" to help me feel like we even remember the glimmer
of what "normal" use to be.

-Cancer sucks.

There's no two-ways about it. In this case, watching a vibrant, brilliant, woman, who had braved more than her share of horrific storms in her life, be whittled down to a feeble, sickly, suffering soul...was just about more that I could fathom. Death in general is such a terrible thing to deal with in all its variables and I'm sure that every person who experiences it in one form or another, feels that their situation is the worst possible scenario, so I won't say that ours was the most tragic or the most painful...but it is, nonetheless, ghastly in it's own right.

So I'm sorry I've been gone. I still don't quite know where I am, but my words and thoughts need a home until they can once again find the safe shelter of my sanity somewhere down this twisty ominous road we are on.

The following is a piece I wrote while spending a lonely night at my in-laws house last December during the holidays. It's raw and full of angst but it's how I felt and I needed to get it out...which is why I am now sending it out into the great void.

12-23-09

I can't sleep.

A bruised and battered rage lies dormant within the confines of my broken soul waiting...

enduring this new loss.

The darkness of the room envelopes me in a lonely void as I lay here missing Candy so desperately that my entire being aches. Each breath draws shorter than the last as the stifling reality of death grips me in it's increasing constrictive squeeze.

With every thought of what she went through , with the increasingly haunting knowledge of what we really lost, and the terrible way in which we've lost it, my heart feels like it wants to pound out of my chest and bleed itself dry as I sob away all the pain I feel inside.

Each tear shed, a memory of the gem I held in knowing her. My dreams like rain wash down over each day, one by one, slipping through my fingers, never to be lived out.

Her hope; her strength; her smile; her light....all vanished.

Nobody talks. No one wanting to remember.

Grief now owns the paths our hearts once freely roamed and gray is the solitary hue on this scene of sadness we now call home.

My anger is rendered useless by the crippling heartache that accompanies this still deniable reality- This woman that I so loved, this mother and teacher, wife and daughter, grandmother and friend - is gone. I am left only with heartbreak and questions;

Why us? Why her? Why now?

For years, I braved stormy seas and waded through the shallow eyes of empty souls, waiting...searching desperately for a heart like hers to enter my life and give direction to the insecurities and unknowns that lie in wait.

Why now is our time cut short just as that gift is found and the journey begun?

No more reassuring smile. No answers to be found.

Just silence....

and the mind-numbing ache as a mentor is lost.

Each day now lived as an empty chair to be filled....A loss to be endured.

-Evasive resolution that will never come.