Parents

Parents shouldn’t be allowed to leave their young children just because of a stupid thing like cancer.

Nor should parents outlive their children.

I started my haiku status updates on a whim, right before Carla died (which I have copied, in completion, here — not all of these were posted on facebook), and I somehow managed to use them to work through some of my grief afterwards. When Julia’s daughter died I was unable to keep it up. It’s just … hard. It’s hard to wrap my head around what I imagine my friend and her family to be feeling, and it’s hard to try to find words.

The human experience is a juxtaposition of hurt and happiness, of pain and pleasure. Sometimes the bad and the good have an agreement and they take their turns in our lives. Sometimes they both jump at us at the same time, and it’s up to us to learn to juggle, segment, and deal.

If you haven’t done it since you started reading this, then you’re probably overdue to give your loved ones a squeeze. We don’t only lose the old, sometimes we lose the young, healthy, marathon-running mothers, and sometimes we lose our children.