A post about the friend who knew...

Somewhere along the road of grief there is an expectation that you will just "get over it" and move on. It's not that people think you have to forget that you have lost someone, but that grief has a time limit. Once you have hit the time limit, then they move on...and so should you.

I was blessed to have a friend who knew, from her own experience, that grief did not have a time limit. We met for dinner once every other month and those dinners were a lifeline for me. We would talk about grief, work, church and politics...a lot of politics...and pretty much anything that was on our hearts at the moment. Two hours would pass in an instant and I would leave knowing, once again, I was not alone in the world. My friend never once told me to "get over it" or served up platitudes about grief. She allowed me to be me, without judgement or expectation.

We met up in September for dinner. It had been a lot longer between dinners, as she was now fighting her own battle with cancer. We laughed and talked about everything we could possibly jam into two hours. It was so, so lovely. The next day a text arrived from her son, she had been hospitalized with pneumonia. For the next couple of months there would be an update every few weeks with glimmers of hope for healing and more dinners together, but in my heart I knew the ending to the story. She died on Christmas Eve.

So grief began anew. Only this time, the person who I could rely on to understand that grief never ended was the one I was grieving.

In my email inbox are pages of emails from my friend. Many are about her cancer fight but tucked in among those are emails of understanding, commiseration and hope. I delete emails all around them, but all of her emails remain. They bring me comfort, as well as tears of grief. I'm not ready to let go of them...and I know she understands.

I miss my friend.

The road to blogging again starts with a sentence...or maybe two

The words that seem to flow easily through my head in the car or in the shower tend to stop as I get to this page and the blinking cursor. That is, if I make it to a computer at all. Blogging on a cellphone or on a tablet just doesn't work for me. I need the clicking of a keyboard, my fingers working and back and forth spilling out my thoughts onto a blank, white page. But turning on a computer at night, after a long day of work isn't always appealing. So the thoughts, the words, the blog post ideas, wither away within my brain.

13 blog posts sit as drafts. On the rare moments when I sit down watch the cursor flash on this blank page, I get only so far and then I lose momentum. I can't find an ending. Wrapping up my thoughts seems to be too difficult, require too much energy and so I hit "save" and another draft is racked up.

Spending time writing is one more thing that has taken a back seat to work. Writing used to be something that I did for work. Passionate words about God and Faith and Jesus that flowed from my heart. My words weren't always written on a page but written in my heart and spoken to ears that needed to hear. Now, the words I write are about office supplies. They don't really come from my heart and, though I am an office supply junkie, I'm not really passionate about them. Somewhere in this journey of life, I wandered away from writing, and I want to get back there again.

And so, the road to blogging, the road back to writing starts now. With one sentence, and then another, and another, and another...