Yesterday....

Today is Sunday.  I missed blogging yesterday.  The first time since I began that I skipped a day. 

I tried.  Wrote sentence upon sentence in my thoughts.  Spoke them in the car.

But I could not put fingers to keyboard.

Yesterday was a day that should have never happened.....

You are supposed to see friends at reunions, at block parties, at some other joyous, momentous milestone events.  You're not supposed to see them at funerals.  Especially not for one of their wives.  Not at this age.

I kept it together throughout much of the time.  "Hello"... "Sorry".... "Call me anytime".... polite outward greetings, required statements for the day.

I chose a seat off to the side.  Alone.  Sometime during the mass the tears began to flow.  I could not contain them.

The clergy talked about a beautiful tapestry and how are lives are the interwoven strands.  I'm not a religious person but I know the tapestry about which he spoke.  I first read about it twenty years ago in a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  I happened to read it the semester in college that my nephew was stillborn.  I always pictured Joshua as the point of a star....touching and being touched by the thousands of strands that surrounded him in the galaxy.  At the time it comforted me...

Yesterday as I knelt there and cried in silence, my mind shouted "Not fair."... "How could you?"...."Why?"  I was angry.  Confused.  This wasn't supposed to happen.  This was senseless...

But most of all, I was scared.

You see, my friends, she left behind her little boy.  A son with special needs.

And at the end when my childhood buddy and his son said their good-byes and turned to walk away, I could not imagine how alone in a room filled with people they must have felt.

How fearful for his son's future...

How fearful for my own son's future...

What if?......

And that is why I cried.