SHARING PAIN

It was a beautiful spring afternoon with sun and soft breezes that made you want to forget your mission. It was early as the cars that would fill the parking lot were yet to arrive. I sat and surveyed the lot, watching people arrive slowly and find their own place in the lot at the funeral parlor.

I could feel the tension that consumed my body for the last few weeks as I viewed my daughter fighting for her life with the able allies called the St. Charles Hospital staff.

The many phone calls and text messages I was answering, the impossible request to: “Keep me posted” ending in many of the calls. The imposition of all this overtaking me as I tried to deal with my daughter’s cancer, something I feared for months but was too stupid to rip the blinders off until finally I got disgusted with everybody, including myself.

But, sitting in the parking lot was not about me, but about another, someone who won my admiration and support when he unquestioningly supported my request to help my son find employment. We had met previously for lunch as we compared our lives after 50-years of separation, and keeping in touch.

His name is Joe, and like me, he has a daughter who suffered greatly but was always hopeful and radiant in her joy, this I know because I know her dad. God called Kristy home and with great sadness for Joe and his lovely wife they met their community to share the grief that was so profound and touching.

Sitting apart from the crowds as they entered to pay their respects to Joe and his family, I couldn’t help but admire the love that came from these people, people who only wished to hold and hug one another in this time of deep sadness.

Joe Conley has lost much a part of his life was taken but will never be forgotten. God has chosen that beautiful young mother, Kristy, to reside among the chosen because she was all good and worthy of such a position under God’s shadow, forever. She was chosen for who she is and always will be, Joe and his wife’s child because she was infused with the goodness of love that came from loving people.

Those parents now have a friend for life who shares empathetically all the pain they are suffering. Tomorrow the sun will shine again, life will go on and the strength of those parents will prevail for all of us as they show us what class is all about.

Pray for Joe and his family, I know I will.