Life is a Scary Thing...

As I sat in the rocking chair this morning rocking my baby boy to sleep, watching his beautiful face and reveling in his preciousness, I couldn't help but think that this morning I was celebrating life and this afternoon I would be mourning the loss of one.

A dear friend died this week.  He died.  He is gone.  I am still having a hard time with this.  How does someone who is so full of life, a presence that cannot be missed, suddenly vanish from everyone's life?  He was relatively young, well liked, loved really, by all, and taken too soon.  I looked at Caden.  I saw love.  The special kind of love that comes from a mother loving her child, her son.  I saw the kind of love that only a sleeping baby can cause a person to feel.

In that moment, I thought that my dear friend was once a baby.  He once was rocked to sleep by his mother.  His mother once looked at his preciousness and innocence and felt she would burst with sheer love and joy.  I know this for a fact because someone like my dear friend would not have turned out to be such a good, kind man without having felt that kind of love.

And that is when it hit me...life is scary.  It is so full of amazing ups and terrible lows.  If you choose to love and have those amazing ups then naturally you are choosing to lose and experience those terrible lows.  The question is which do you choose?  Do you choose to love and therefore lose?  Or do you choose to skate through life content but never experiencing the two extremes?

For this answer I chose to look to the people I have lost for guidance.  My dear friend loved life and loved people.  He chose to love.  I sat on his back porch last night, surrounded by his friends and family, my friends and family.  We cried a lot last night.  We laughed even more.  Even though we all wanted to run and cry and scream the unfairness of the situation, the injustice of it all, we didn't. We laughed.

That is who our dear friend was.  He chose to laugh, to love, to live.  He wanted us to live and celebrate life, his life.  Not wallow and mourn his loss.  So that is what we did.  To honor him.  He loved that we were laughing last night.

Today is going to be hard.  We have all kept ourselves busy all week, going through the motions, telling ourselves it will be ok.  Will it be ok again?  That is our choice.  We all have our own families that need us, our own lives to live, our own choices to make.

Life is a scary thing.  This morning I put my baby boy to rest in his crib.  This afternoon we lay our dear friend to rest for eternity.  I would not have changed a second of knowing him for this hurt I feel.  I am a better person for knowing him.  His porch was full of people that are better for knowing him.  Today people will show up in humongous numbers to honor him, to remember him.  Every person he knew, he made better.  Last night we laughed, today we will cry.  He is just going to have to let us cry for one day.  A person that special deserves both laughter and tears.  Today I choose to cry, and wallow, and mourn.  In life I choose to laugh and love.  I hope we all choose this path and make him proud!