There are times in your life when those words are exactly the truth you don't want to hear. While there are other times we mourn something or someone lost, I bet you, like me, think first of those excruciatingly and exquisitely painful first days after a loved one has passed away. You feel so much like something inside of you is gone. Irreplaceable and irrecoverable. Yet, the world keeps turning on its trip around the sun. Grass grows. People go on about their business. And one day you find yourself awestruck that... life goes on.
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| Photo credit to her Daddy, Rory Feek. |
I had that experience this morning. It was this simple picture of a little girl with a great big smile shared on the
Joey+Rory Facebook page. She reminded me, in this moment her Daddy captured and shared with the world, of another little girl with an equally infectious smile and zest for living. But it was his caption that while he could usually see more of her Momma today he saw himself that made me catch my breath. The little girl in the photo is Indy. The other girl, the only child of a couple I knew in Georgia, is Kaydee. Most often when I see a picture of Kaydee, I think she looks like her Daddy but every now and again her expression is purely a reflection of her Mother. There was one just this past week that kept me staring and remembering the ultimate kindness, generosity, and cheerful words of a friend gone before we ever got to know each other nearly well enough.
You see, besides the huge grins and amazing spirit these girls have in common, Indy and Kaydee both lost their Mothers to breast cancer in the last year. I don't know a whole lot about the kind of cancer that took Joey Feek but the one that stole away Kaydee's sweet Momma is an insidious and stealthy killer for which there is no cure. Her cancer was one that masquerades as a host of other diseases making it easy to overlook and misdiagnose. One of the Atlanta television stations recently did a feature story on
Inflammatory Breast Cancer that explains there's no lump or tumor to show up on a mammogram, only a reddish patch that looks a lot like a heat rash and the grim truth, that while treatment can slow it down, this cancer kills 100% of the time.
While we mourn the loss of their Mommas and marvel at the resiliency and acceptance of little girls like Indy and Kaydee, we find that truly life goes on.
With or without you, life goes on.
Note to self: Choose to participate. Accept what is, work to fix what needs fixing, find your zest... Find your smile. Do it every single day.
