Two Years of Life

I write with dampness in my eyes.  It's not the same sad it was two years ago, when we were given our daughter's official diagnosis, learned that she would die.  Learned that at the same time her bright comet was streaking into our universe she was already starting to arc her way back out.
There's no lie in the notion that life is not fair.  We've known she was sick twice as long as we thought she was well.  Two years ago I lived with dampness in my eyes.  I breathed with heaviness in my heart, I managed with weariness in my soul.  Two years ago, there was so much sadness that I fell away from regular feelings about regular things, into a universe with a different gravitational pull.  Since then though, she has lived, teaching me a lot about living in the process.
I am no longer in that raw place where thinking about Celia's fate makes me cry every time.  Maybe just every other time.  But thinking about her lot is still what I do while I'm doing everything else.  Now, more often than not, there is an alive feeling that the sadness brings.  Not depressed sadness, but sadness that awakens, points, focuses.  There is an exquisite feeling that gets stirred up by sorrow, that says today is for living.

I don’t mean to sound trite, but I believe that her life has been life.  Abbreviated.  Sometimes hard, sometimes humorous.  Often complicated, occasionally ridiculous.  At times painful, frequently peaceful.  Sometimes perfect, sometimes perfectly horrible.  Full of love.  Life.
JEB