Lost

Hello Lovelies, I'm not running out the door, as I thought, just yet. All day yesterday I thought it was a day later! So it turns out I've got another day to capture my thoughts on digital paper, as it were, and I thought I'd continue the slightly sad track I've been on lately. Maybe this is just to get it out of my system before the adventure and thrill of an all-day train trip and a week in the embrace of my family. I look forward to that with breathless excitement, and I'm deep in the process of getting my house ready for another long absence, the likes of which only July knows:) Before I head out, I have some processing to do, and it has to do with loss. Particularly the exquisite loss of the unnamed--what am I mourning? Why do I miss what I can't define? Why does it hurt so much? I've had so much experience with loss in the last 20 decades. First was my dear dad, then the man I told myself "Dad" had picked out for me to marry and cherish until neither of us died alone, in spite of our mutual and abundant physical challenges. We were strong in mind, and I thought that would be enough. On Saturday June, 30, 2012 at 2:10 in the afternoon, one of us did die alone, while I sat in an absurdly rosy-colored waiting room, disbelieving and unable to comprehend all that had just happened in the past tumultuous day and year. Also perhaps the best year of my life. I couldn't hold one solid thought in my head for at least two years after that. I got things done, I really tried to continue my life, but it was pretty much impossible. Eventually I gave up and moved from the home I was trying to make with Michael. That part of my life died too. In the years that have followed I've lost a would-have-been brother-in-law who was like my own blood relation; a man who called me his sister. I made the arduous two-day train trip to see him, and I will never forget the last time we hugged. Or the last thing I heard him say years later as Covid devoured him quietly--"I love you too." Why do we have these thoughts, lovelies? Why do people come into our lives, change everything forever--and then get taken? It's something I'll never fully grasp. If I live to be an old lady, I will never know why some of us go through so much loss and others don't. Or why the broken are drawn to and draw TO them, fellow broken people. Some would say it's because I have a healing spirit, and those I lost were just part of the reason I'm here. But I'm not sure that's fair and balanced:( Why do that to one person? How much can one individual woman take--no matter what she herself has overcome? Does it matter that I have a healing spirit if I end up alone?