Hi Caron:
Thank you for taking time out of your day recently to post your update about your husband and to reach out so warmly and intimately to Carriek. Your heart is generous as you share it openly, with tenderness marking your every word. I admire your ability to share your vulnerability. That’s never easy.
It’s wonderful that when you last wrote you were having a good day and that your husband’s appetite and energy has improved. I understand your relief and his for that encouraging development especially in light of the difficult news you both received about his health. I am wishing many more of the good days for both your husband and you and your growing family. Congratulations on your expected summer baby blossoms!:-)
Caron, I sometimes find myself in an awkward position when I read your posts and those of Carrie’s because I have never experienced the same type of situation yet I empathize with you both. I wish to say some magical words that would help ease your heartache, but I know it is not words that heal our hurting hearts but the intentions that inspire them. I hope you and Carrie both know we all on Virtual Hospice intend to be here for you, to listen and to console you throughout your time of uncertainty and grieving and to offer our comfort and care.
It’s especially wonderful to see you and Carrie nurture the bond you share which is born of a common understanding of your husbands’ illnesses and your shared experience with sadness while trying your best to be strong and to cope with it all. You are both extraordinarily heroic and inspirational, although I imagine you would each choose to be considered average and to live your ordinary lives without the challenges you and your families face, if given the chance.
Worrying that I may say the wrong thing at the wrong time causes me at times to hold back from responding to your posts but I do read them and ponder your circumstances and offer prayers for you and Carrie both, and your families. Our spiritual beliefs are such personal matters. If I were in your circumstance, or Carrie’s, I am not sure I could say with such convincing conviction that I have deep trust in my concept of and relationship with a higher power as you do with such enviable resolve, yet I am glad that your unwavering faith sustains you as you struggle with your agonizing feelings. Your faith is a wonderful comfort, I am certain.
When I was young my Mom was a very religious person and she raised me in the Catholic Church and I was expected to naturally follow in prayer her footprints to faith. For me as a child I found this more than a challenge, and trust me I prayed fervently for my belief in God to grow, yet He always felt distant to me. I could not accept blindly without deep questioning and ever-present doubt His existence. The grace of faith that came so instinctively to my Mom alluded me until adulthood, and when mine blossomed into a spiritual force of its own it looked a little different than my Mom’s, but in essence, there are many elements of her beliefs that I still honour and retain. I do believe that we are all spiritual beings but I also believe that we each discover the meaning and value of a Divine Presence and experience its depths in our own time. In any grand plan there are endless interpretations, I imagine. I also understand and respect that some people reject spiritual matters entirely. There are, I believe, many different paths to profound enlightenment and our experience along the way is as individual as are we.
For those who don’t have the same reliance on faith in God as you or my late Mom, times of crisis can make them worry or wonder if God even exists. I can relate to this kind of thinking because when my Mom was suffering mentally, from my child’s eyes, it was hard to accept that an all powerful God would permit anyone to feel pain without intervening to stop it. Life and God and religion are deep topics and difficult to penetrate. I don’t have the answers, but I do know that life includes more suffering than we wish for, and some people have more than what is fair. Trust is an issue for me, and as I contemplate God and matters of faith, I am beginning to trust more in the Nature of things but it is, I admit, not easy because the child in me still wishes for a God that would save the world and all the people in it from having to struggle with loss, sadness and pain. I’m a dreamer and my faith is a work in progress.
Until dreams of a blissful existence are divinely manifest, we inhabit the world as it is and find hope in our wishes and prayers. I will be thinking of you and yours and wishing you the strength to endure the sorrowful mysteries of life as you find inspiration in your faith.
Hugs to you and your family xo and to Carrie and her family xo