Rough Days

Death doesn't generally wait for us to be ready. Except where I work, where when it does expectantly come, while it is none-the-less painful, it is often seen as a release after a long and difficult illness. This makes a sudden, unexpected, emergent death very hard to take. Hard to absorb, hard to fathom. Particularly at 07:10 AM as you are just opening the days activities.

But it came suddenly to one of our little ones yesterday. Unexpected, unexplained, unwelcome. Despite all our best actions and intentions, death won. And we lost something precious.

I can only talk about how it feels. The details are not mine to share. But I feel like I have been shaken awake after falling asleep on the train, and woken bewildered and disoriented, unsure even of my name, at a stop far from my original destination. "Where the hell am I"?

There have been a number of deaths in recent weeks. The holiday season is often accompanied by a run - a set of threes - a rash of final journeys. I have heard statistics that say females die after holidays, and males before. The past three weeks however, they have been all over the place.

There are probably four more imminent, which will each take their own toll on our team.

For now I think I'll pretend that I don't see the distant descending tsunami wave and lay here on the beach. "Just another few minutes".