I know that we cannot always live within the light. I mean, if there is light, than there has to be dark, right?

I am a sentimental and a romantic and a believer in black and white, so the gray and the dark pummel me, most of the time I respond with an adamant, “No!” Sometimes though, something happens and there is no other way to describe what I am feeling than to say it is sorrow. I just went and checked to be certain that I wasn’t misusing the word:

a feeling of deep distress caused by loss, disappointment,

or other misfortune suffered by oneself or others


It went on to list lamentation:

a passionate expression of grief or sorrow


I am steeped in sorrow right now, some of it for a friendship that is not, some for that which I cannot identify but falls into some shade of “keeping up” and the last for the inevitable confrontation of mortality. I know it’s there, I’ve known it since before I understood what it was. A part of me has always been aware of its brushing against the door, when other kids were asking for ponies I was pleading with my mom not to die, not to leave me.

Now it’s here. The inescapable commonality we have, of the promise of loss, is perched beside me, I know I don’t have to do anything, there is no Quixotic battle to be had. It is what it is. As a daughter I loathed it, as a parent I resent it and as a person I genuinely fear it.

My pendulum is squarely lodged in a dark place.

I am bone tired from the normal things on my plate and emotionally spent from that which is not essential. A part of me wants to take a part of the small section of superfluous and tell a few people to take a flying leap. The thing is, that won’t change the reality that people will do and say as they like, even if it means being disingenuous (that is a kind label) and life will take the turns that it will. I can’t change fakes and I can’t unwind time.

We can forget the big words and just say, as Casey did, we are all hurt. Things happen. Quickly.

Right now, blessed though I have been, I am sad. And I think that’s ok, even though I don’t like it.

And I will make it out of this.