Recovery

We’re back from a one week trip to Maine. There are mounds of seriously stinky clothes and towels outside the laundry room. I just returned from two hours of driving the kids to various camps and soccer practices. The next two weeks will involve lots of driving and I’m not entirely sure where I am supposed to be and when. I have the next hour or two planned, but beyond that, things are a haze of responsibilities that haven’t been duly logged into the calendar.

I’ll write about our trip to Maine later, after I download the camera. I do love the occasional travel blog post. I also need to get caught up to speed on the Internet gossip. But first, I need to tell one quick story.

On Wednesday, we were sitting around the campfire, and I took my cellphone back from Ian. He had possession of my cellphone for most of the trip. I really do need to get him an iPad Touch for Christmas. As I surfed through e-mails and caught up with Facebook, I found a message from a very dear friend, who was one my best friends all though middle school and high school. I’m the godmother to her 14-year daughter. She’s one of those people from my past that I only talk with about one a year now, but when we talk, it’s like no time has passed. Everybody should have friends like that in their lives, and I’m lucky enough to have about a dozen of them.

She told me that her oldest son, a Freshman at Harvard, a crew team champion, a Presidential scholar, and an all-around good kid, had a very small, inconsequential tumor in his chest, but his immune system confused the tumor with his brain cells and pretty much wiped out his brain. The boy was in a vegetative state in a hospital at John Hopkins and had little hope of recovery.

I called her immediately from the woods of Maine, and we talked until the cellphone reception conked out. We talked again for two hours on Saturday night, when we came home.

It’s every parent’s worst nightmare. An early death of a child. Especially a child with so much promise. In a family of super high achievers, he was the star.

While her son has little hope for recovery, my sweet friend has to learn how to recover. She has three more children to shepherd to adulthood. She still has to get on with her own life and can’t crawl into the cave of depression.

Over the years, I’ve seen people grappling with all sorts of grief. The grief of losing a job, not having children, divorcing a turd of a spouse, managing a child or family member with a severe disability, the passing of a loved one. Everyone gets their share of grief in life, but it comes in different packages at your doorstep. There are some that manage to keep on top of the pain, while others let the pain devour them. The ones who manage the best are the ones who keep plodding on and accept that their future isn’t quite as they imagined, but it will still be a good future. They don’t look for meaning or God or foreshadowing or science in explaining the cause of the pain, but they find meaning in all the good things that still do happen in the midst of the devastation.

Ugh, I’m back from vacation and the first thing I write is depressing. I’m surely going to lose all my readers. I’ll redeem myself with the blog post, but I needed to vent.