6 months on

It is 6 months today since Kirstin died. Somebody posted this somewhere - I am too lazy to look it up, but it communicated what I first heard in the movie, 'Shadowlands': that joy and suffering, love and pain are always, absolutely always, inseperable. I have, in the years subsequent to seeing that film, read and heard that truth expressed similarly in a variety of ways. This was one of the 'tightest' imo:

The sense of loss
must give way
If we are to value
the life that was

Grief is not a sign of weakness
Nor the lack of faith
it is the price of love… (Author unknown)

The marvel in my view, is not that this is true, but that as in another classic, The Thorn Birds, our human need or drive for love gives us the courage to love in spite of what is inevitably, to come.

"There's a story... a legend, about a bird that sings just once in its life. From the moment it leaves its nest, it searches for a thorn tree... and never rests until it's found one. And then it sings... more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. And singing, it impales itself on the longest, sharpest thorn. But, as it dies, it rises above its own agony, to outsing the lark and the nightingale. The thorn bird pays its life for just one song, but the whole world stills to listen, and God in his heaven smiles. "The bird with the thorn in its breast, it follows an immutable law; it is driven by it knows not what to impale itself, and die singing. At the very instant the thorn enters there is no awareness in it of the dying to come; it simply sings and sings until there is not the life left to utter another note. But we, when we put the thorns in our breasts, we know. We understand. And still we do it. Still we do it."(Colleen McCullough)
Rest in peace, Kirst. In Him.