We are never fully ready when it comes.  Not really.

It can come suddenly, smack us mightily, steal those we love without warning, and leave us in our own dust, brushing off, never the same.

It can give warning, some time, a luxury with a downside.  We know they're going, and we're stripped powerless to stop it.  All we can do is say the long goodbye and watch and wait.

But we're never fully ready.  Not really.  Not for that.  Not ever.

I've stood at that door, cursed it, tried to scare it back, sometimes successfully, but it's always temporary.  Those we love are given to us only for a time on loan, and when they're gone all we ever want to do is shake a fist at the heavens and unleash our own fury.  Trying to make sense of it all, even for those of faith, challenges us like nothing else.

This was a tough week for it, busy as always, taking people we don't know, people we do.  A young woman goes over a 90' waterfall on a first date.  Her parents are devastated, grandparents prostrate with grief.  A loved husband ends a battle in a hospice.

I didn't know either of these people personally, but am dumbstruck by both, knocked back.  When it happens to those we love, the entire universe centers on it, resets.  It's easy to forget that every day on this planet wrong turns, wars and hospices are giving up the beloved of many.  We forget when it doesn't directly touch us, but it never stops, continues to sweep without warning or caution and take loved ones with it. 

It never gives an exact date, an appointed hour. 

I met it early in my own life but never shook hands, always regarded it as an interloper, became well acquainted when it stole my father, saw its nuances working in a hospital, learned how to read its tea leaves.  On three unforgettable occasions I was unexpectedly the person there at the other end of the hand when it came, in a hospital in Omaha, a nursing home in Utah, and a hospice in Wisconsin, taking a friend's aunt, my own, and a cherished friend, three well loved women.  It was an expensive gift on all counts.

Well meaning friends will always say the same, something about blessings, and suffering, and it was their time.  I shake my fist.  I shake a collective fist at the heavens and summon up everything inside and say it's never a good thing, not the way it comes, not the way it steals, not the way it terrorizes.

Because we're never fully ready for it.  Not really. 

(photograph of child in forest:  The Forest Wanderer) 

For Adelaide Flenniken, Aunt Hazel Frazier, and Blanche Maney, who each taught me something unforgettable about the journey.