Saying Goodbye too soon

Marcia’s Goodbye

I was at a birthday party when my mom called yesterday.  My breath catches just a moment and my pulse quickens every time I first hear my mom’s voice calling at an unexpected time. Who now? I whisper as my heart closes in on itself.  Many times it is a light call and I begin to breathe again, embarrassed by my conditioned response. This day, my back to the bathroom wall, I slid down into a tight ball on the floor.  Her words inconceivable to me as they have been too many times before in this wretched millenium.

I felt like a character in a horror movie who having just escaped the monster turns a corner to be face to face with it again…

My precious, priceless foundationally essential cousin Marcia, gone in a flash on a Sunday; too soon; too abruptly; too maniacally wrongly.  The tearing of the sacred jaggedly cutting it’s swath across my heart. How can this be? How? How? How?

I fell asleep that night in a numb haze of disbelief and unwilling sorrow.

The next day, I woke up with an unformed song on repeat in my head. I knew the tune but couldn’t quite remember the words.  Google helped and it turned out to be “I AM” by Crowder:

“I am holding onto you. I am holding onto you.  

In the middle of the storm, I am holding onto you.”

“There’s no space that His love can’t reach

There’s no place where we can’t find peace.

There’s no end to amazing grace.

Take me in with Your arms spread wide.

Take me in like an orphan child

Never let go, never leave my side.”

In my sorrow, I was given a song from somewhere in my past, loud and clear to help me navigate in my present.  A gift simply there when I awoke.

The journey of grief is a sticky, painful mess. Death smacks of the wrongness in the world but the sweet gift of a song encouraged and bolstered my quaking self.  I AM is holding onto me in the middle of this storm. The whirling dervishes of my panic are slowing with that truth. Perhaps, now I can begin to do some holding myself.