A Cup of Comfort for the Grieving Heart by Colleen Sell

Author:Colleen Sell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Adams Media, Inc.
Published: 2010-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

In My Own Time

“W ill it ever stop hurting?” I ask, leaning against the wall in the narrow hallway, as if it might soak up some of my sorrow.

Reluctant to face the darkness outside alone, I am the last of the group to emerge from the small meeting room. Rachel, the group facilitator, gathers her raincoat and keys and prepares to lock up the Grief and Loss Center for the night. After three hours of describing my own despair and listening to the other women express the rawness of their pain, I feel spent. Yet, as I walk toward the door, more tears spring from some unstoppable source, forging new trails down my damp cheeks.

Rachel touches my shoulder and says with a quiet certainty, “At some point, Laurie, you’ll realize that there are other things you would rather be doing on a Monday night.”

“I can’t even imagine it,” I whisper, even while I cling to the possibility that she is right. I wrap my coat tightly around my thin, run-down body and head back into the world of which I no longer feel a part. A world that doesn’t seem to notice or care that I have lost the person closest to me on the planet and that I’m not sure that I can bear it.

A sharp wind blows the last of autumn’s leaves in senseless swirls; they scuttle and scurry haphazardly through the empty streets. Caught against curbs, they flap pointlessly or fall, brittle and used, into the grates of corner gutters. The wipers on my car swish quickly back and forth across the windshield, keeping time with the pelting rain, working hard to keep the glass clear so I can make my way back home. But there is no home to go to anymore. Not since that black July night when I watched my mother die in the back bedroom, while all the neighbors slept safely in their beds.

My mother walked three miles a day, rarely had so much as a cold, and seemed destined for the same centenarian status that her mother and aunts had achieved. But a lemon-sized tumor that had silently infiltrated the front right lobe of her brain had plans of its own. Eagerly, it stretched its cancer-filled tentacles into the far reaches of my mother’s brain, stealing life from her, one faculty at a time.

I fly home and move back into the childhood bedroom that I’d left ten years before. For the next two years, I rarely leave my mother’s side—through brain surgeries and countless seizures, after she stops walking and talking, during the months of open-eyed coma. And when, just after sunrise on that summer morning, I watch the black van carrying my mother’s body drive up and over the hill and I see the neighbor step out on his porch in his pajamas to get the paper and unroll it to read the headlines, I’ve never felt so utterly bereft.

“So what are you going to do now?” my mother’s friend asks

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