Grace

Tonight I was planning on writing about Yom Kippur and the issues I have reflected on. But then I received an email that made my fat ass, strange delusional fantasies about torturing the people I hold pit-bullish grudges against, and excessive use of the f-word seem, well, petty.

There's this woman in my writing group, Kay, and her husband has brain cancer. Tonight Kay emailed to tell us that her husband is declining exponetially and she won't be able to come back for a while. Now, Kay is this beacon of goodness. She's got what most of the world longs for, a deep, solid pocket of hope and faith. And when you are with her, that hope is contagious. She sees the possibility in everything. To know that tonight she is out there in this October gloom, suffering, it makes me cry.

Two years ago, almost three, another good friend lost her husband to cancer. A year before that, my soul-sister's toddler daughter died. It's such a cliche to say that life is fragile, precious, not to be taken for granted. It's so smug, so trite to say that. But tonight, I feel like there's only one thing for me to focus, reflect on, absorb and make part of my very essence. Live every moment, squeeze every single second of life because right now, everything is ok. Tommorrow that may not be. But right now, this one, single, okay moment is perfection. That is the state of grace.