Shadow

I finally have a brief moment to say hello.

We're in Canada with my parents. We are here to hold their hands as my step-dad passes. It is hard...for him, for my mom, for all of us. I didn't know that dying could be so laborious. I can see that he's ready to go but his body isn't there yet. I wish I had something incredibly insightful or uplifting to say but the truth of this is that it is all so real and painful. There is nothing I can do to lift this up into something it's not.

A few years ago, he gave each of us this poem:

"A little while and I will be gone from among you, whither I cannot tell. From nowhere we came, into nowhere we go. What is Life? It is a flash of a firefly in the night, it is a breath of a buffalo in the winter-time, it is as the little shadow that runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.” (Crowfoot, Chief of the Blackfoot Nation).

I am so grateful for every moment that I have had with him.