This Day, Once Again

       

Coming soon........but not today.

    Once again, I am sitting on this dark day.  This morning, it is four years ago today, that Daniel got up in the morning, got ready to go Christmas shopping, ate a bowl of cornflakes, and then collapsed and died in the bathroom just minutes later.   Immediate CPR did nothing.  Two epinephrine injections did nothing.  The AED the sheriff's office brought did nothing. The helicopter from the major medical center did everything, to no avail.  I still cannot fully believe, even four years later that God can call and reassign us in just a second.   I guess I always knew God could do this, but I had never seen it, in this way, as a registered nurse, or as a human being.
                Since then,  our family has struggled to make sense of the life which remains. Sometimes we have done very well, recognizing and accepting that Daniel was an incredible gift from God to all of us, and accepting God's calling him home with a clean autopsy here on Earth.   Other times, we give way to the very human anger and deep sorrow that losing our youngest family member with no notice whatsoever brings.
                 Grief is a very strange thing.  In some ways, Daniel's departure from Earth seems like a very long time ago. So much has changed here since.  Two of our children graduated from universities, one bought a house, and we brought another family member home through adoption, as Daniel has always wanted us to do.  Other times, his loss from Earth seems so recent, so acute, and so focal.

Sunrise this week over our farm   (Photo: David Krehbiel   copyright 2012)

 

                I am also so struck by how different this day is year to year.  The year Daniel departed, the leaves were just beginning to turn and autumn was not well advanced. Other years, this one included, the empty winter is sternly upon us, as if our farm itself, knows what day this is, and that it should grieve.
                In this life, we largely make our own joys where we find them, and I am determined to make what the bereaved mother's groups call an "angel-versary" count.   This year, very shortly, a book sharing some of our experience of Daniel's life, his loss, and our survival will be released worldwide.   It had been my intent to have it released today, but book publishing lacks the scientific precision of rocket science, and so it should be forthcoming very very shortly.  Besides, I am starting to realize that there is a plan to this life, and that most everything does have a reason, or at least, a rhyme.
                Please pray for our family as even now, four years after the loss of our youngest member, we each process the loss in a different way, and on different timelines and speeds.  Thanks for reading.