Life as a Feral Wind

Although there has been some degree of peace and quiet in our lives for awhile - hence the neglect of my theraputic blogging - it looks like the onslaught is gearing up to begin again.

My wonderful grandmother, at the age of 91, is now finally finding certain simple life tasks too difficult and no longer has the strength to continue taking care of certain things that she has fought so hard to maintain for these past several years. Age and frailty are finally taking that from her, too. It is not so much a shock as a sad recognition that, at a time when we will also be losing a beloved aunt to inflammatory breast cancer, we are also losing our stalwart grandmother who has been there our entire collective lives. Her decline may also be, in part, tied in to the decline of my aunt who, as one of my grandmother's daughters-in-law, has been very much a part of her life and her heart; mother of five of her grand children and as much "daughter" as "daughter-in-law." Perhaps we do, eventually, become too old for grief.

Throughout all of this, my poor brother still hovers, fading slowly as much a prisoner to cigarettes and fantasies as ever, but still very much my younger brother whom I love greatly. I don't yet know how he will handle the loss of our grandmother or our aunt, although I don't think he and our aunt were particularly close given the nature of his illness and the loss of her eldest son to suicide. Her family and ours were all very close in age to each other and Mike and my cousin were similar in interests and temperament in some ways.

I can feel that feral wind of life blowing behind me, growing ever louder, demanding attention and sucking everything dry in its path, as is its tendancy during gathering storms such as the one we are approaching yet again. Strangely, although one might think it would be a fetid wind, as well, it is not. Merely one that draws the marrow from your being and chills you through to the heart of your existence so you feel as if you will never be warm again; never feel life or love again. It blows through a soul and leaves a fossilized heart in its wake, one that used to be warm and beating but that now struggles to merely make note of its existence for others to witness.

Such is life and such is the price of growing older - if you survive you must bear the burden for all of those who do not survive with you.

There is the sound of gently falling water in the background, and the night has grown quiet. I think of all those I have loved and lost and all of those I have loved and still have with me and realize I am very blessed. I may not be quite able to explain it right now, but I know with an inborn conviction that it is so.

May we all know how blessed we are; how fortunate to know love.

Izzlebug