Value

One of this kids in Gillian's school died this morning of brain cancer. He was in second grade. He struggled for a year with it until it swallowed him up whole at 6:45 this morning. She had come home last week with a little star attached to her dress button that said "pray for Jake", and we all prayed for Jake, and now he's gone home. That was the answer for that little baby soul. The one God sent here as a sacrifice to teach the rest of us all something about love-what you love, how you love it...why not to take for granted the things you love will always hang around waiting for you to figure out how to express your love.

These lessons are a little hard on people. I know a few things about losing people I love-they're all dead now except my gypsy sister. All I could say this morning when I collapsed into Sean was something about how people can forgive God for being selfish enough to take that baby back when he hadn't given all the joy back he could have given. That's such a human thing to say. It's born of grief-the grief I feel for his mother who has been fearing this day since he was diagnosed...who has prayed by his bedside for moments and days and months...who only wanted to watch him grow up to be a virile young man with his own joyful family. I felt that grief for a second, hearing the story about how he sweetly smiled in his last moments and how he was given last rites by Father Grassi. How no parent on this wide green earth should ever have to ask for someone to give their baby his last rites. But how beautifully he took them. How wise he was, glimpsing over the edge. The they said to him was "heaven is beautiful, and it's ok to go home." How his mother informed the school that "Jake earned his wings peacefully this morning."

I'm thinking about how we get tangled up with this place when it's a blink. We make castles in the sand. We build them up, these monuments of humanness, and they wash away in the ebb and flow of eternity. We are each a grain of sand, nothing more...but so beloved by the sea that our constructs fail the will of the lapping waves, and away we go. They say everafter is beautiful, and peaceful, and so.familiar. So his little grain was enveloped to be joined with everything that has ever been or ever will be--in the tapestry of peace that is the universe. Godspeed, peanut.