5 months

Kit passed away five months ago now, and she was five months old. Tuesday, April 28th, will be the tipping-point day, where she has officially been gone 171 days, the same amount of time she was here.

Death is blurrier than people realize. I sometimes think of the moment she had her stroke as the moment she died, since so much of her died in that moment–and all hope for her died then, though it took us (and the doctors) a little while to verify that. None of us wanted that to be true.

I had to tell a neighbor who didn’t know the other day, tell her what happened. She said she thought Kit was inside, being sick (she knew she was fragile) and the weather cold this winter. She had wondered.

I’ve become pretty good at telling the story in a concise way that hits enough of the highlights for someone to understand but doesn’t go deep enough for me to cry. Not everyone wants the whole story, and I don’t want to tell the whole story to everyone. It’s impossible to live like that, so very raw and open.

I am not entirely ungrateful for this Quarantine, this time of isolation. Even though He did not heal Kit in the way I hoped and wanted, I still trust God as the ultimate healer, and I’ve been interested to see, in a sort of passive, observing way, how He plans to heal me after this horrible thing. Now what do you plan to do about this, huh? I pray sometimes.

Healing has been in unexpected ways–family grief therapy sessions and individual ones, growing closer to some people and shielding ourselves from others, writing–more so than I would have ever expected–and now this isolation. Maybe isolation is what we need–how am I to know? I’ve stopped trying to make sense of what and why things happen.