Remains of the Day

Marc Chagall, Job Disconsolate, colour lithograph (undated)

Disclaimer: I am sitting at my kitchen bench, looking over the remnants of the day: crumbs on cutting boards, tea towels left where they fell, onions scattered on a work surface.

I see a life lived in haste.

Truth: I haven't written anything for myself in a long time. It's 5:15pm, and I should only just be finishing my work day at my corporate job. I can hear my children play in their room and I want to smile at this quiet, familiar moment, but I can't, just yet.

Again, truth: I don't actually know if I am going back to my job, as I find myself on a mini mental health holiday which began when I got up and walked out of a meeting that was going very badly yesterday.
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On the 21st of January this year I was at said corporate desk job, when my husband called me and told me that his friend  - and my beloved cousin's husband - was found dead in his home. It hit me somewhere in the solarplexus: I saw a widow, four fatherless children, a family, my family. All grief-stricken. 

A young life was smote. A candle had gone out in a dark, lonely flat - the light had left dark, lonely eyes. Nobody but God knowing the extent of this young man's suffering. We were all sick with grief. 

My sister Nina offered to look after my children so that I could fly to Sydney for the funeral.

On the day I was flying out, Nina called me to tell me that her child, (my godson, Edward, not yet two and the sweetest baby) was very ill. I followed the family chat, at my corporate desk job, while Edward left the local doctor's office, went to hospital, and was soon admitted and receiving a chest X-ray. I read as a mass was found near his lung. I cried, remotely, en route to the airport when the doctors grimly stated that the mass would need to be biopsied. 

The funeral was a river of friends and familiar faces. Hundreds of people came. And I no longer knew who I was crying for. At night, I no longer knew which akathist to read.

And so, bit by bit, we found out how sick little Edward is. We learned words like neuroblastoma. We watched a little boy take it all - jab and assault - like a warrior, all the while trusting us, trusting the doctors. We cried and we were afraid, and this boy, he took everything in stride.

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I need to think.

And pray to God to know what to do next. 

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I have to reacquaint myself with the story of Job and to expand my understanding on the idea of Divine Wisdom.  Perhaps God is not so much One 'who giveth and taketh away', as the One that wants us. All of this tragedy is chipping away at everything until I realise that we're just lonely, dark-eyed, scared children, and we should trust Him.