It has been a little more than three years since, what was for me—and a few others, that fateful Saturday in November, and I find myself drawing this story to a close. The journey I have walked since that day has been as difficult as it is rewarding and as terrifying as it is wonderful. Continue reading
Love Abides – Chapter 9.2
I was settling in for the evening one night not long ago. When I arrived home, my wife, Heidi, handed me a package. I opened it to find a book from a friend 5,000 miles away in Nottingham, UK. It was a book her son wrote in the form of a collection of blog entries in the wake of a heartbreaking diagnosis. Accompanying it was a hand written greeting:
“Hello Guy.
Strange, isn’t it, how small the world has now become, but how it is still the universal things of love and loss that unite us?
I am pretty sure that our sons would have liked each other—they have so many shared traits. They left the world too early but changed the lives of those who carry on.
Ours can sometimes be an intolerable burden but it can be easier to bear sometimes when you come across a fellow traveler and stop to chew the fat for a while.
With very best wishes,
Kay”
Filed under Life or Something Like It, Parenting
Love Abides – Chapter 9.1
How do you say goodbye to a child—to your child? How do you tell your son goodbye for the last time? I am left with only questions and memories. Questions with no answers and memories that are malleable. Things that pose questions of what is real and what is imaginary.
There was so much left to do. And now you have gone. I hope you found your peace. I hope you found the respite you were so desperately seeking.
Rest now sweet child. Rest now. Lay your burden down and rest in the knowing that you are loved and always were.
– A Parent’s Lament
How, indeed? This, the first of so many laments I penned, now seems prophetic as I think back on the common rhetorical question I was asked innumerable times:
I can’t imagine. How do you do it?
Quite simply, it is love. Continue reading
Filed under Life or Something Like It, Parenting
