In January last year, I looked at the previous year and said, “gosh, that was hard.” I looked ahead to the year to come and thought about all the ways that it was going to be better: I had great plans for fresh, life-giving rhythms for my self, my work, and my family. Perhaps I should have been forewarned by the words that God gave me for the year, “this is what we’ve got to work with.” Maybe I thought I’d learnt enough about limits for now, and that I was just going to learn to live within what I had already discovered.
But in February we realised how sick my mum really was. Her “barely a cancer” cerebellar tumour was affecting way more than her balance, in ways the neurosurgeon couldn’t explain. She lost her words, she lost her peace, she lost her will to live, and in early May we lost her.
Near the end of June I was starting to feel the ground beneath my feet again, when my dad had “news.” Something suspicious had popped up on his liver. Eventually we realised it wasn’t the prostate cancer we already knew about, instead it was likely a metastatic melanoma staging a takeover of his internal organs and bones. Optimistic as always, he struggled to face his own mortality, but, even stoic as he was, he couldn’t ignore the pain. In November we sat with vigil with him as he passed, just two doors down from where my mother had died six months earlier.
It was not a better year.
Some White Space 