With The Wind

“Love is like the wind, you can't see it but you can feel it"...(Nicholas Sparks). I woke up this morning to a sad e-mail about the mom I wrote about in my last blog article. Her battle with Lou Gehrig's disease ended this week. I was overwhelmed with tears...thinking about her two beautiful 5 year old boys, missing their mommy. I thought about the struggle she went through over the past few years, facing her disease with such courage as her body continued to shut down a little more each day. I thought about her amazing husband, who cared for her in every way and who had to be a single dad much of the time, while watching his once vivacious wife become incapacitated. I saw him this morning at school and even though his sun glasses hid his tears, he smiled and hugged his boys, letting them know that their daddy is there for them and that they'll get through it together. I stood with him and cried as I offered my condolences and we hugged the type of hug that only grief can allow. His wife and the boys mommy is free now....allowed to travel like the wind. No longer mired down in a body that had shut down, she can spread her wings to fly. Now she is free to watch her boys grow from a different vantage point, from spirit. Her love will always be there, like the wind...swirling around her family, reminding them of the woman she was and the love she felt for them. Love does not disappear with death or time. It is the one constant in this world....it is a force like none other. Love survives anything and everything. I know that people often struggle with their own feelings around loss. I've watched as many disappear when a loss occurs. People are so overwhelmed and awkward that they just don't know what to do or say to someone who has just lost a loved one. Being genuine is the best gift you can offer someone grieving...and tears are a genuine part of loss. “Those things that hurt, instruct"..(Benjamin Franklin). “To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness”...(Erich Fromm). “Tears are the silent language of grief”...(Voltaire). I cry today in honor of an incredible soul who has soured out of this world into another. I cry to honor my own feelings of grief....feeling incredible compassion for her family, knowing that they miss her profoundly. I cry because it's really all I can do to express how I'm feeling right now. “Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face"...(Lydia M. Child).