This week

This has been a brutally hard week.  That is what I tell people when they ask how I am doing.  I don’t say I am fine or not fine, I just say this has been a brutally hard week.  My sweet cousin A lost her husband this week.  It was sudden, it was shocking, and her world has crumbled.  She is left to raise their five year old son alone.  Comparatively, my week has been quite easy.  I have cooked for A, and her father and brothers and anyone else who happened to be near.  (My love language is carbs.)  I have wiped her tears and looked at her song selection and the pictures she chose for the memorial service, and I took her shopping for the clothes she and her son would wear to her husband’s funeral. 

After all of these things, I have come home.  Home to my husband who is still alive, whose shoulder I can cry upon and tell him ‘this was so hard!’  And then I eat dinner with my family and sleep with my husband and say many prayers.  And the next morning after everyone has eaten breakfast and brushed their teeth, my sons and I head back over to her dad’s house to bear witness to her grief.  I am able to walk away from the deep shuddering grief in which A exists right now and breathe, which she is unable to do.  So comparatively my week has been easier.  No matter how my heart aches or how many tears fall, it is a paper cut in comparison to the ocean of grief in which she is swimming.  So when people ask, I just say it has been a brutally hard week.