The Darkness

"In these days and these hours of fury When the darkness and answers are thin." A few months ago a beloved coworker lost her teenage daughter to a drug addiction and drugs that were dirty, tampered with. The struggle had been for quite a while, longer than I knew. When I did know I'm sure I only knew the most surface challenges of a teen daughter who did drugs and would run away. She was a beautiful girl. Not that physical beauty defines value. Yet she was a beautiful girl. So much of her personality seemed to match the outside. But the drugs. When I heard the daughter had died, my aunt's words rang in my ears. "Very few people know what this feels like." In therapy, at least one of my therapies, I was told there's no winning, there's no competition. I did not lose my flesh and blood daughter. I had just about as many years with Stevie as she did with her daughter. In all those years My Stevie never aged. His personality and his mentality was the same on the day we met as the day he died. He was almost always a little boy. "Very few people know what this feels like." One day last week, completely unrelated, I became ill and went to the emergency room at night. Everything was minor and handled very well, and 3 days later I realized I hadn't been taking my depression medicine that is supposed to level out my seratonin, or whatever it is they do. I was in the vehicle for a 2 hour drive and cried for quite a way. I got to my destination and pulled out my bag and had left the medication behind. Just in time for a wedding. Last night I told my husband, as he admitted to missing his brother during the wedding, that I too had cried for what we lost while I was sitting at the wedding. There's a picture I can see of the bride with her uncle taken so many years ago at another wedding. He loved that little girl. He would have loved to have been at her wedding. He would have wanted cake. He would have danced at the reception. The darkness and answers are thin.