M4 W4 D4: The adultness of life

I was a very sensitive child. Oversensitive, really. I always had intense emotions. I was wildly happy, deeply sad, overwhelmingly hurt. I also had an uncanny ability to sense a person's true mood, even when they were faking another one.

This was not easy on my parents. I was always bursting into tears about something, out of sadness or happiness. I realize now it must have been intensely stressful.

A. is the same way. His goldfish died on the same day that we sold the tank of tropical fish (angelfish, a gourami, and sundry others. Yes, we had two tanks of fish!) Losing all of his pets on the same day was just too much for his little heart to bear, and he sobbed about it for 20 minutes, curled in my lap. Then he looked at me and said, "Loving is hard, Momma."

Oh yes, it is hard. A.'s first lesson in the adultness of life: Loving is hard.

I've been watching that happen around me this month. Friends struggling with love and family and loss.

A family that attends our church lost a son to suicide this week. My heart is broken for them. How inexpressibly awful. And yet they pray and hope and struggle to work through this grief. My admiration for them knows no bounds, as well as my sadness for their son and for the disease that took him from us.

I've also been watching three sets of friends struggle with married love. I'll say no more about that here, except I love them all and am praying for them.

In my own family, my grandmother saw her heart doctor in the past two weeks, and was greatly relieved she would not need another heart operation. But my mom and I want to shake her because she would have been fine if she'd listened to her doctor rather than a cab driver. The doctor told her to take her meds. The cabbie told her not to. She listened to the cabbie. So now she is on a much "tougher" drug for life.

One of my life's mentors, a childhood friend of my father's, is very very sick again. His cancer has returned, and he's too sick and weak for chemo. This man has now had cancer three times in his life. I'm praying for a miracle at this point. His mother's prayers produced one when he was a teenager. He is one of the kindest people to ever walk the Earth, and we will all have lost something if he leaves us early.

Loving is hard.

And yet, with all this, my life continues with its busyness and happiness. I have always felt deeply, but then the feelings move on. Happiness is never really far. I wonder if I am essentially shallow.

But then I remember the quote another blogquantance recently posted, from Albert Camus: "In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer."

I have always had that invincible summer. God willing, I hope I never, ever lose it.