11. It's Really Not All About Me. Really.

Today I woke up really, really low. It's just now 10:45 and I just got out of bed, after a sickening blow to the gut of depression, followed by two bouts of a good cry. And right now I have to ask myself: my gawd girl, what are you thinking? So much incredible pain out there right this minute and you're all undone over a five year relationship? A 22 month marriage? Really?

Right now a woman in Sacramento is grieving over the loss of her husband of 40 years. Jerry's twin sister, my former sister-in-law, and my friend for 23 years, is sitting alone in a big house filled with forty years of memories. Seven weeks ago her world came crashing in when her husband Kenneth was diagnosed, out of the clear blue sky, with a deadly brain tumor. He went quickly, and last week she became a widow. Five weeks before she lost him they were planning for Thanksgiving with their family and Christmas with their grandson. They had no idea those holidays would never come for them; that she would actually spend them as a solo mommy, a solo grandma.

Right now four families; three wives and one husband are in a daze, on their own private journeys of bitter alone-ness, weighed down under their own waves of loss so profound it makes my own loss seem pitiful and ridiculous. They are the families of the four Lakewood police officers who lost their lives in a senseless, shocking mass assassination while they sat innocently in a Pierce County coffee shop. They will not spend Christmas with their husbands or wife, dads or mom. They will watch little ones open presents, already purchased, from their lost relatives, and figure out how they're going to explain this glaring aberration.

Somewhere someone is dying, someone is getting a grim diagnosis, someone is on the phone calling everyone in the book because a teenager did not come home. The waves are cold, huge, dark. They are ripping open the hearts of good men and women who, like me, had no idea they even existed, much less were about to pound down on top of them.

Who am I, God, reader, to be so caught up in my little pain? My loss is miniscule, really. I hope and pray that this realization will help me battle the terrible fear of what lies ahead for me. How sad is that... me me me. God would You please, please take this pain I have for my own silly circumstances and turn it into pain for those suffering losses I can't even imagine?

I prayed this once a couple of weeks ago: Lord, break my heart, as You've done, not for my own life situation, but for others' pain and loss. Break my heart, God, for the lost.