One of my close friends has been through the wringer this past year. Her mom was diagnosed with breast cancer and has spent the year going through treatment. This past month her brother was in an accident and will need to go through extensive physical therapy.
I just attended this friend’s baby shower. It was a beautiful gathering of friends and family celebrating new life entering the world. New life. When celebrating a baby, you don’t think about life’s fragility because babies have their whole lives ahead of them. However, juxtaposed next to the rest of what my friend has been through recently, it’s hard to not recognize that in the blink of an eye, the vision with which you see the future can be jeopardized. Read more at Too Damn Young:
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It always feels a little odd to mourn someone you never knew or never met, but the pain of their loss isn’t any less real.
For me, when Harper Lee passed away, it was like I lost an old friend. She wrote the character of Scout Finch, who was a representation of herself, and might as well have been a representation of me. Read more at Too Damn Young: It’s been four years since my dad passed away. It occurred to me that in the time I’ve written for Too Damn Young, I haven’t taken the time or space to just tell you about my dad. As I was thinking through what to say, I began to find it overwhelming. I couldn’t figure out how to express 19 years of my life with him in a way that made any sense. Then it occurred to me: the senses.
Read more at Too Damn Young: A friend’s mom recently passed away, which brings the count to four of my friends who have lost their parents in the years following my dad’s death.
In terms of being a supportive friend during those times, I think I could say with certainty that I have failed. I’m horrible at knowing what to say or do, regardless of my own personal experience. Read more at Too Damn Young: Growing up in the 90s and early 2000s, the internet grew up with me. When I was young we didn’t have the internet at home, then eventually we upgraded to extremely slow dial-up, then to high speed, and now the internet is at my fingertips everywhere I go.
I like that the internet allows our lives to be so easily shareable. I like that I can keep up with long distance friends and relatives, and that the important moments are captured and preserved with so much convenience. As someone who is fairly introverted in “real life” situations, the internet has been a pretty safe place to be. I make friends more easily online. I can speak my mind more easily online. It’s an outlet for me to feel connected while still having the comfort of being by myself. What I don’t like is that the internet has become a place to say or post anything without concern of how it affects anyone else. Read more at Too Damn Young: When you’ve experienced the death of your father, grandfather, cousin, mentor, and multiple friends within a five year span, strength feels like a metaphorical concept that doesn’t really exist. When people point out how strong they think I am, or how strong I must have been at any given time, my first instinct is to refute their claim. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Philippians 4:13) has become an overused platitude that I hear all the time and I’ve come to resent.
Read more at Too Damn Young: I saw a comment on my “Grief is Not a Season” on Too Damn Young from an 11-year-old girl named Cliona who had recently lost her dog, Peppy. Cliona said that I might be thinking “it’s just a stupid dog and she’ll get over it.” I wasn’t thinking that at all.
Read more at Too Damn Young: The intentions are good! Saying that we’re “going through a season” is supposed to be a reminder that there is a time for
everything in life, good and bad, and everything we go through is a part of God’s plan. That’s fine. The best of intentions, however, don’t always have great implications. Let’s think about our perception of seasons. If you live in an area where there is seasonal climate change, you understand that seasons are fleeting, lasting no more than a few months. They come, you experience them briefly, and they leave. You move on. Saying we’re “just going through a season” implies that whatever we’re experiencing will be over soon. That in a few months or less, we’ll have moved on, the past will be the past, and everything will be fine. Read more at Too Damn Young: For my birthday this year, my grandmother sent me a small index card with very familiar handwriting scrawled across the front and the back.
It was a letter (or more likely, the draft of a letter) that her late husband, my Paw Paw, had never sent to me. It was really an incredible gift that she was able to find it. Read more at Too Damn Young: I began at a local community college, and just as I started my second semester of my second year, my dad’s battle with cancer went downhill. I dropped out of school, we put him on hospice, and he passed away shortly thereafter.
Along came Carrie. Read more at Too Damn Young: |
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