Another difficult morning

A couple years ago, a woman I had known from church and AAUW moved to North Carolina. Her husband was long-gone, the brother (IIRC) she had been part of the support system to had died, her health was declining a bit, she wanted to be near her daughter.

I found out this morning (because I am not on FB) that she was killed in a car accident this weekend.

Yeah, screw 2019, man.

For me this was particularly hard - in a way, harder than "she had a heart attack" or "she caught an infection and died of it" - because of recent events in my own life.

Man, I hope the people in AAUW already know and will announce it (we have our monthly meeting this coming week) because I am REALLY not up for being the one who makes that announcement.

Then we sang "Joyful, Joyful, we Adore Thee," and the ONE thing I know about my dad's upcoming memorial service? We will be singing that because it was his favorite hymn. So that was also hard because I was thinking of that.

At greeting-time, Mike hugged me as he usually does....and I just didn't want to let go of him. Oh, I did, of course, seeming "inappropriate" is the one thing worse to me than the hurt I might be trying to soothe in the moment. But part of it is I just want the people I care about, more now than any time before, to be SAFE. I want them around me and safe and happy and well, and it seems more and more, being over 50 means no one you care about is safe.

***

And then, standing at the back (because I was eldering today), the thought popped into my head: Well, eventually every one of us will be "safe," when we've passed beyond this life.

Even for someone like me who has been pretty much a lifelong Christian, that was not as comforting or as reassuring as it should be.

I need to finish piano practice and probably set a timer and force myself to clean the house for an hour. I *think* I have Wesley board meeting this afternoon (at any rate: I have not received an e-mail saying it was cancelled) so I have that going on.

At least tomorrow will be less-hard than it might be, thanks to all the work I put in on Friday; pretty much all I *have* to do other than teaching is do a bit of research and maybe start writing the stats exam for next week (Am thinking I could heavily "recycle" one from past years, just change some of the numbers in the questions - and change them in the keys that I have already made up, one blessing of that is that I won't have to do the heavy calculations)

But yeah, everything is still kind of terrible. I think it's three more weeks before we lose our minister and are once again thrown on our own resources, and like the church secretary said: NOBODY DIE.

(Well, also, I suppose: nobody decide to get married, but that would be an easier problem to work out because there'd be time to get a supply minister in, or one could even just do a civil ceremony. Though of the uncoupled people in the church....well, I'm probably the only one who might *seek* to get married if she met the right guy, and it's doubtful that will ever happen, so).