Tag: Friendship

I didn’t write here yesterday because a friend’s daughter died an hour after birth.  We’re not terribly close, but I found I could not let the news go.  I lit a candle and worked until about 4.30 and then gave up.

Modern medicine can make us feel like we have limitless options and tortuous decisions to make.  And, that illusion of control can lead to a sense of culpability.   In facing the inevitability of death, grief and fear are surely enough pain, without guilt as well.

Is this too heavy for a sabbatical blog?  Maybe.  Though it is certainly part of the answer to “where did the time go?”.  I learned the news on a social media site and that’s the primary venue in which I talked about it and offered what comfort I could.  That shocked some of my friends to whom I mentioned it in passing.  But, that is one of the venues where the family chose to share the news and who the heck is any one to judge what is easiest or most comforting or comes most naturally in a time of crisis.  We live online and death is one big part of life.

I’m going to DC this weekend to catch up with old friends, some of mine, some of SDA’s, pre Turkey.  None have any connection to my undergraduate days there.  I don’t have a single friend from those 2.5 years.  Odd, as I’ve collected them from all the other years and geographic locations of my life.  I do, however, have an abiding love of Lincoln at night.  It will be good to see him again and think about the vices and virtues of my nation.