on losing Kobe

I go to bed tonight shook from today’s news.


Not because Kobe was such a super star athlete.


Not because everyone knows him.


My heart actually aches for those he leaves behind.


Tomorrow starts a journey his loved ones never asked for or could ever fathom.  And they’ll only learn to navigate it as they actually go through it.  Grief is darkness.  It is confusion.  It is silence and abandonment when you are desperate for help.


There is no manual.   No right way.  Just hold on and let go all at the same  time.


The hardest part of grieving as a mom and wife was that it was the hardest thing I’d ever done and I had to do it without the one person I had grown to lean on and confide in.  The one person I needed to go to for love and comfort, was gone.  It felt like being asked to climb  a giant mountain but my limbs weren’t functioning.


And I had to be a source of strength for my kids, but I had little strength to give on most days.


All the news coverage brings me to a place of so many feelings and so many memories. 


And I just pray.


I pray for God to give strength that only He can give.  And that though this mother’s heart might be broken for a season, that it will be mended and healed and that she will rise from these ashes with strength and wisdom and faith and straight up LOVE like she’s never known.


I was thinking tonight about the strength of a woman.  The mama’s heart that will not surrender to the heartache this world can and does throw at her.  The woman who takes all that was meant to destroy her and her family…and instead surrenders it to God, grows through it, fights  through it,  prays through it, and in the end USES  it to live  more full and alive and awake than ever before.


This is my mission.  And it’s not one and done.  It’s a daily choice to remember my pain,  and to   live on anyway.  To not just survive the loss, but to allow the breaking to produce growth that honors the relationship  and time I spent with the one I lost.


Our days are limited.  People don’t seem to get it.  Even though we get reminders all the time. It’s why I hate gossip and pettiness and drama.  


Life is short.  What are you doing with your time?

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