Healing that transcends Beyond Time (Ambient mix)

Loss of a LIFE

Today I learned that my cousin lost her father. Last week a childhood friend lost his mother very unexpectedly. Almost seven years ago I lost my own father to kidney cancer. An expected loss is no less painful than an unexpected one. And even though death is inevitable and we all know it will happen to those we love and to us, the grieving must still take place.

This morning when I contacted my cousin to give my condolences, I experienced that same awkwardness we all experience upon hearing about the loss of a life of someone we love. I didn't know what to say - words seem so shallow and unmoving. They just aren't able to convey an empathetic understanding of what it will mean to my cousin, me not having lived her experience with her father, will never understand the full impact of the loss she is today experiencing. I only hoped she could feel my hearts love enveloping her pain and comforting her in the only way I could being more than 200 hundred miles away, and that is with thoughtful prayer and love sent to her with my mind and heart.

As I thought about her father and the man he was (I should have blogged about him so I could have written about the man he IS, now its too late for that) my own father came to mind. I thought about and how she and I, each being a part of them, will always have them with us in some sense. She had said to me that her heart is broken and she is in shock. Both of which I knew and experienced.

I said to her I knew this, and that he was such a good father and grandfather and husband. He had a beautiful, quiet, reserved spirit about him and he was a very good Godly man. I expressed to her that one of the comforts me for came in moments after my fathers death when I would wish that he were still alive to so they could have met him. I would find myself saying to new people in my life "I wish you could have met my father, he was so wonderful". And in saying that to others I began to understand the depth I had been blessed to not just have known him but to have given the awesome opportunity to have been HIS daughter. The sadness of his loss never goes away but time allows the pain time to release into more - maybe appreciation, maybe understanding, but its no longer just pain. I told her that I know my dad is still with me in so many ways because I, Yvonne, partially defined who he was. My rebel spirit, my outspoken persona, my wit and sarcasm, my tenderness - all inherited from my father. I am my fathers daughter. And she is his.

I told her to allow her heart to be broken. Let the love they had heal that.

I told her to miss him, but to tell him she misses him.

I told her to be in chock, but know it will pass with acceptance.

and then I told I loved her. Those were probably all the words she really needed to hear.