Life Goes On

It has been over a week since the funeral and almost two weeks since we got the dreaded phone call to say that she was gone. I am both comforted and disturbed by the passage of time. Comforted that life can go on. But equally disturbed that...well, that life can go on even with this gaping hole in our lives. How can this be?

Yes, this is all of our first (minus Meridith's husband who suffered 3 significant family losses for 3 consecutive years) encounter with the death and grief on a personal level and these feelings that are so novel to us have been a sad reality for so many before us. Though no one loss can be compared with another in terms of degree, and no two people grieve the same loss the same way, it feels a lot like the kinship I felt with other women who had given birth once I gave birth for the first time, only with a lot less joy. At the very least, you are instantly transported to a greater level of understanding, awareness, and compassion for grieving people: past, past, and future. You can identify with a degree of grief that up until that point was foreign to you.

But then life goes on. Carpets get cleaned. Primary elections get held. Trips get planned. Meals get eaten. New messes get made. Vehicles break down. And neighbors die, of the same kind of cancer your dear loved one did.

We got the call the day before yesterday that our neighbor at the end of the street had found his esophageal cancer which had been treatable 7 years ago had returned and that it was terminal. He died yesterday morning. His name was Paul. He was 65.

So Monday night we had Jeff's dad over for breakfast dinner. Right as we were sitting down to eat, one of the kids made a joke about how that was David's cue to wake up because it seems like he always does. But he didn't. Instead, the phone rang. I didn't recognize the number and assumed it was likely someone from the Mike Huckabee camp as they had been ringing my phone incessantly over the past week. But for some reason I answered it anyway. And I'm glad I did.

"Hi, Janelle, this is Kay SoandSo, you don't know me, but..."

It turned out that she used to be a neighbor of Jeff's family about 20 years ago and Sharon had led her to the Lord through some at home Bible studies they had done together. Eventually they moved away and lost contact over the years. She lives in Phoenix now, but had read Sharon's obituary online and looked up our phone number to express her shock and sympathy.

It was neat.

And comforting.

And worth giving up my hot pancakes to take the call.