One Foot In Front of the Other

It seems as we get older, there are goodbyes around every bend in the road.  My mother passed away in August.  We lost a dear friend in January to leukemia.  My dear friend's father is in hospice care.  As Kenny often says, "None of us get out of this alive." No goodbye is easy.  We feel grief and guilt at the same time.  What if I had...?  Would it have made a difference if the doctor had...?   Could we have done more?   Keeping vigil over the last hours with a loved one is like watching a train travel slowly down a track and knowing that you can't get out of the way.  The train is coming. Parents, especially, are devastated by the death of a child.  It is not in our makeup to bury our children.  How do we go on after a child is gone?  This weekend, I received an email from a friend whose daughter has been battling cancer.  "She is gone."  Gone where?  To Jesus, to the best day of her life. ...

Do we believe or not?  Can we trust that God means what He says when He tells us that "our times" are in His hands?  Do we have the courage to suffer and yet be thankful? I'm asking myself these questions today as I think and pray for people I love who are going through the hardest experiences of our earthly life - letting go of a parent or a child. In this finite life, there will be partings.  Just as sure as we are born, we will all die; when someone we love dies, it is as though our flesh were being torn, gaping, bleeding wounds left behind. What I am finding is that, with HD, this parting is a drawing and quartering of a life, of everyone's life.   The tear is not quick, like a bandage being ripped from delicate skin.  It is a long stretching, tearing, and separating of flesh, bone, and joints.  It is a slow death march to the inevitable. While I am thankful that we still have Lacy, and that glimpses of the bright, engaged young man we knew emer...

We were able to show the documentary "Alive and Well" at our local theater on Thursday night, February 27.   My thoughts on the movie - it was just like life. Not knowing what to expect, I was excited and nervous.  I wondered where the silver lining was in all these stories of people who are living with, or at risk for, Huntington Disease.  Turns out, there isn't a silver lining. It was a brutally honest film, which in a way was a comfort.  There were a couple of young people who had tested positive for HD in the film:  Young women who were frantically putting as much living as they could in the lives that were rapidly disappearing in the rear-view mirror.  There was the young woman who sobbed uncontrollably when she tested negative for the gene - perhaps the most gut wrenching of all since those of us who did not get that news wish we had.  A drummer whose wish was to have "just one day when I didn't feel this way."  A young woman who buried ...