Sitting in the hush of nap-time wondering about the rhythms we experience in our life, sometimes going through an accelerated tempo with regard to children’s milestones, other times it’s professional obstacles, personal breakthroughs and of course those delightful financial hurricanes. What triggers them? Do we all go through them with such force?

This has been a repetitive theme for me, this sitting alone musing. This year has been more concentrated with drastic shifts for our family I grope for logic, some way to intuit what might come next, because if there is one thing I seem to be able to count on, it’s that something else will be coming along. Be ready.

I am not. And I guess maybe that’s the lesson, be ready to not be prepared. Brace yourself to support someone tweeting something tragic, only to find yourself experiencing a parallel event mere hours later.

I am more frequently measuring where I am, not my looks or my finances, but rather my stage of life. I have young kids, but I won’t be having anymore. I’ve been married seven years, not a newlywed and not that long married just the same. My parents aren’t that old, but they are planning for when they are. Death is a frequent visitor, if not to our family, to that of our friends.

I have cried loud, ugly tears in my car during recent weeks over things beyond my control—near misses, imminent passages. Nothing is sacred from loss or hurt and we all carry it on some level each day. I wish I didn’t feel so shocked by it. I try to hold on to its piercing so that when confronted with ridiculous acts of desperation by others.

Yet here I sit, faced with a death we have known was coming, but are not prepared for and pelted with little bits of shrapnel from other people’s hurt and fear. There is a childish part of me that wants to sit and rail against death and the unfairness. Another part of me, an increasingly difficult to ignore part, is beginning to accept this cloak.

Where ever you are, whoever it is you are weeping for and however it is you are doing it, I wish you peace and courage.