A heart

Death.

It's been a topic on my mind a lot lately.

I recently watched How to Die in Oregon while I folded laundry.  I cried throughout the movie. It was really hard for me to watch the mental and physical suffering of the individuals and their families.

Today Piper and I talked about dogs and I mentioned that she used to have a dog and that she loved him very much.  I told her that he was black and big and she loved to lay on him.  His name was Diamond.  She just listened.  I'm not sure that she remembers him.  I realized that we are coming up on the one year anniversary of his death.

Then yesterday Mike updated me on the wife of his professor.  She is dying of cancer.  They don't believe she will live much longer.  I keep having images of her in a hospital bed with her husband sitting next to her.  The images are less clear than the grief I feel in my heart.  

Thoughts of Laila's death keep popping up in my mind and I remember the night as if it happened yesterday.  It is such a painful thing to relive in my mind.

Since moving here I've struggled, not having my support system near, not being able to visit Laila, and not really having anyone here to talk to about Laila. I feel as though I've managed my feelings well but this past week I had a harder time and I found myself unable to sleep one night thinking about her and wishing I could feel her presence.  I prayed that night that I could just have some kind of reassurance of her nearness and of God's awareness of me.

Today I woke up to a beautiful, white world.  I opened the back door to take a picture and my eyes immediately settled on a piece of ice sitting right by the door.

A heart.

Piper snatched it up and ate it.  But not before I got a picture.