August 9, 2024
It’s been three months. Or so I hear. It feels like it’s been one long day since Kathy died. I blinked and we were celebrating her life at the Memorial Service. I blinked again, and this Summer is surrendering to Fall, hardly putting up a fight. One way I’ve tried to slow the arc of this season was for the boys and I to take our time reading through the cards we received during Kathy’s final days and the My Kathy Story notes from the Memorial service. We needed to pace ourselves anyway because the sweetness and strength of those messages was overwhelming. We have been so encouraged by the outpouring of love and support from our family and friends.
Among the condolences and tributes, there were a few requests or encouraging suggestions for me to share more of my perspective on this journey–My Kathy Story, as it were, between and beyond the pages of her Metamorphosis scrapbook of Facebook posts (you can access that booklet, along with the program and recording in this Memorial Service folder). I think I’ll call it The Rest is Yet to Come.
As a good faith down payment on this project, I’ve created a blog site where I’ll be sharing some of my reflections that made it into writing over recent months (years?). Some of these are letters I’ve written to the kids, to Kathy, or just my own journaling. Reader beware: enter this forest at your own risk. These considerations rolled out in real life in real time, and are still not the entire story; so if you’re looking for pat answers, polished testimonies, or pious resolutions, well, we’re not out of the woods yet. I’ll start by sharing “Kathy’s Passing Notes,” and intend to post more over time. Maybe these are too late to be interesting, or still too soon to be appropriate; maybe they’re too personal to be relatable, or too meandering to be helpful. But, like with anything else I might share, I pray that God would take something of our journey and let it be an encouragement to yours at just the right time.