Nothing to See Here…

Death, you know… that thing that happens to great-grandmothers and hamsters and people in war-torn countries far away from here.  That.

A friend of mine, a woman I have never met but whom I call friend, has lost her husband suddenly and unexpectedly.  She is an internet friend and I have known her for five years.  I have congratulated her on the birth of her babies.  I have debated with her, sometimes on the same side of an issue and sometimes on opposite sides.  This friend today came and posted that her husband is dead.

I’m still in shock.

Contemplating the death of spouse is not a foreign concept to me.  I have a husband who is a life-time diabetic.  We’ve had to call 9-1-1 several times.  At times, I’ve had to administer the shot to get his body to quit convulsing.  He’s already had a couple near-death experiences in his 36 years.  We already know his lifespan is many fewer years than his contemporaries who do not have the disease.  I worry about death sneaking up on us.  I worry about the gut-punch of sudden death.  I worry.

Those things I worry about have just become a reality for my friend.  She is a mom (two little girls) and a librarian.  She needs to figure out a way to draw her next breath and her next breath and her next breath.  I could say “there but for the grace of god go I” but how selfish of me to even think such a thing at this moment.  And then there is the fact that I don’t believe in god and if I did?  Well, then he’d be the recipient of all my rage at the moment.  WHY???  WHY?  I can’t believe in a god because I can’t contemplate the cruelty of such a thing as this.

I hurt for her, and yet my pain seems trite.  How can I even say that *I* hurt?  I mean, come on… my pain is nothing compared to what she is feeling.  How can friends draw together and support someone going through this?  She asked us to please not reply with the sad face emoticons and the cyberhugs and I don’t blame her.  Is the irrepressible desire to do something, to help, to reach out, more about us - about our helplessness - than it is about her? 

I want to send her flowers, money, whatever I can think of that might help but really none of it will.  What is needed here is the one thing no one can give and therefore everything else just seems laughably pathetic.  Laughable to think that somehow we can help, somehow we can ease the pain of this.  Still, doing nothing doesn’t seem to be the right answer either.  I can leave the cyberhugs out of it, but I want her to feel my presence, my shoulder, my ear, my sorrow, my rage.  Something.

Perhaps the only thing I can do is go home and fully appreciate my own husband and children and the world as I know it today.  Perhaps bitching about the messy garage or the untrimmed hedges is less important now than it was just hours ago.  That may be all I can do, and yet it won’t lessen my friend’s pain one iota.

The lives that we carefully design and build for ourselves are never assured and today there is one person I know who has learned that lesson in the most difficult and painful way. 

Today, life’s a bitch.  A real true god damned bitch.