June brings to mind the summer between the fifth and six grades when a family move felt like an earthquake…an unexpected event that shattered my pre-adolescent footing.

Life seems to be filled with those moments…those moments when the phone or doorbell rings and in the summoned steps between here and there we are, unknowingly, moving towards a voice…a presence that messages the unimagined without a return to the life we embraced. These life changing moments occur throughout our lives…some of them are, in hindsight, minor losses that resolve through a period of resistance, anger, tears, and sleep. Then, there are those losses and deaths that first numb us and then leave us so shaken that our life view…our life scape is forever altered.

On Monday, of last week, once again a shattering moment as I walked from there to here. A cancer diagnosis, accompanied with many discussions of the potentiality of death…its meaning, its resolution, its fear, its expectations, its imprisonment, its choice, its loss of consciousness…but never, ever its actual moment of being.

In the past, I found that the resistance to these moments has the potential to open doors to new understandings that will, in time, bring an acceptance to or intensify the various elements of grief and loss. These sacred journeys also have the potential to inspire creative endeavor that gives voice to loss that is heard and felt by others and begins to ease an unimagined loneliness.

But, not today…not today as my body trembles with grief-driven anxiety. My mind is shaken with a constant flow of unanswerable questions. My total being is pushed again and again by the expectations of others and an undercurrent sense of denial pleading that this is another navel deployment.