Another step into the cyber system...

I am stepping into the blogging world with one intrepid toe, not quite sure what I am getting into. Maybe this will be just me talking to me, which is fine with me because I talk to myself all the time!

Life is on fast forward these days.... I am busy promoting my first book, Refresh Me Lord!: Meditations to Renew a Woman's Spirit and seeking to launch a speaking ministry called CHARISMATA COACHING... All of this while working full-time as a Development Director and before all of that... I am my daughter's mother and my husband's wife... and my mother's only daughter.... My father just passed away 3 months ago after a long struggle with pulmonary fibrosis which is an excrutiatingly difficult disease of the lungs.

Caring for him in his last weeks was one of the greatest gifts I could have been given, as difficult as it was to see him suffer and struggle to breathe. I cherish the time that we spent on his "via dolorosa." Prayer sustained us all. I believe that the Blessed Mother is always near when her children are suffereing and especially at the end of life and I can honestly say that I felt her presence and the strength of her graces.

If anybody reading this is a caregiver of someone who is dying, I want to say... pray without ceasing in whatever manner that you can. Sometimes a prayer is a sigh, or a tender touch, sometimes a prayer is a quiet tear or the holding of a hand. Sometimes a prayer is a scream of exasperation, sometimes a prayer is a fitful night sleep... just offer it all to Jesus. He knows what you are going through. He and his mother have been there.

Now life is busy but not too busy to grieve. Honor your grieving as you honor the memory of your loved one. Your season of sorrow will pass but not too swiftly. We experience the pain of loss in stages, like waves that crash and then subside, only to return, with a different constellation of emotions. Everyone of them is necessary and "good" in the sense of being a part of what it means to say goodbye to someone we so dearly loved.