in the Shadow

Last Wednesday my uncle died unexpectedly.

I drove in the dark to his apartment.  How soon he left; I wasn't ready.

The week, discomfort sank in -- Silas sick, Ben away, friends experiencing other losses--but mostly death came, its heavy breathy presence.

Death alone hurts.
But death never comes alone.
It brings the weight of the deaths that have come before it and all the deaths that will follow.
It weighs heavy.

It reminds us that though we walk in our own brightly fastened lives, death will crash in, and crash in, and crash in again, waves that knock us flat and breathless, as long as we are living.

The sea never stops breaking.

How will we endure it, the waves in our faces, salt water instead of air?




                                                  yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death....