Day 30 (Fri 5th May 2006): The sacrament of the present moment...the eternal now...

" I remembered a past that included people that I did not want to give up, and I imagined a future that excluded people I desperately wanted to keep....I was deprived, therefore, of the comfort that good memories provide and of the hope that a good imagination creates...."

" We recover from broken limbs, not amputations. Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same. There is no going back to the past, which is gone forever, only going ahead to the future, which has yet to be discovered. Whatever the future is, it will, and must, include the pain of the past with it. Sorrow never entirely leaves the soul of those who have suffered a severe loss. If anything, it may keep going deeper....Catastrophic loss is like undergoing an amputation of the self from the self, as a husband, mother, father, brother or friend....The self I once was, this familiar self, cries out for them, like nerves still telling me that I have a leg or an arm, though only a stump remains...." - A Grace Disguised, Jerry Sitser.

Papa tells me that it is hard for him to imagine life without mummy now. Just like the patient who has amputated a limb, he often gets phantom pains. It begins in the mornings, when he awakes. He half expects to see mummy walk into the room with a cheerful smile and a knowing look that says "you lazy pig, it's about time you woke up!" Or when he gets home after a hard day, how he wishes he could greet her with a simple hello and a peck on the lips. Or the times when he sinks into a couch, how he half expects mummy to snuggle up with a cup of cold milk and have a conversation with him about the day's events. He can still hear her singing in the music room and the melodies that would emanate from her piano playing as he reads the papers. He wishes that whenever there is good news about my progress, that he could simply call her up and tell her all about it. The phantom pains of his "former identity" as he calls it, lingers on. Papa says it hurts especially when he crawls into bed, half expecting mummy to cuddle up to him, to rest her sleepy head on his chest and to feel the warmth of her caress and to gaze silently at the contented smile on her freckled face. Nowadays, Papa says that exhaustion is his ally against pain. It is the opiate he relies upon to numb the wrenching throb of an aching soul, it is the anaesthetic that makes him drowsy before his head hits the pillow.

"And sometimes, when the cry is intense, there emerges a radiance which elsewhere seldom appears: a glow of courage, of love, of insight, of selflessness, of faith. In that radiance we see best what humanity was meant to be... In the valley of suffering, despair and bitterness are brewed. But there also character is made. The valley of suffering is the vale of soul-making."
-Nicholas Wolterstorff, Lament for a Son.