Heartbreak

My heart broke a little this week.

You see, I have this friend.

I've barely known her a year, but we feel like lifelong comrades.

She is warm and kind,

compassionate

transparent,

and hands-down the most generous person I have ever known.

Yesterday she laid to rest the love of her life and husband of five years.

He suffered a dissecting aortic aneurysm and spent a week in the Intensive Care Unit where his health deteriorated and his organs began to fail.

She has a kindred story, one of struggle and pain - of victory over darkness. Our friendship was wrought of an unspoken understanding of the fires we had endured, the character they imbued and the appreciation for who we became.

When the words came across my laptop screen that her devoted husband - loving surrogate father to her two elder children and devoted Daddy to their darling daughter - was in the ICU, I felt the air go out of my lungs.

A week later the inconceivable news that he had been "Carried to heaven in the arms of Jesus" caused an ache in my belly that to this day I cannot remedy.

She had survived. She had trusted the Lord. She had been blessed with a life that was beyond her expectation and the partnership of a man she considered her rock and the love of her life.

And she knew it.

She was grateful and forever cognizant of her abundant blessings.

And in her pain, in her sorrow, she continues to speak of the strength and love of her Lord God.

I'm not so sure I could do it.

To one day wake up, knowing that the life my husband and I crafted together was now mine to commandeer alone.

To look into the eyes of our precious children and somehow explain why Daddy isn't here, won't be back, still loves them and is with Jesus.

And that same Jesus loves them and wants the best for them.

But no matter how much they want him ...

how much I want him ...

He is forever gone, and there is nothing I can do about it.

A striking reminder that this world - this life - is ephemeral.

These things we hold dear run like sand through our fingers,

at once warm and familiar, and then gone.

Nothing on earth is forever ...

"Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal, lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal." Matthew 6:20