I’m up for a bit of a fright this time of year, maybe a ghost or two hanging in a doorway or a witch and her broomstick flying in a tree. I even kind of like those fake headstones people decorate their lawns with.  I can kind of geek out on Halloween.

I’m not one iota up for the kind of health scare my family had with my mother last week.  For the record, I’m not up for this no matter what time of year it is.  I’m not up for it no matter what year it is.  I will never, ever be up for it.  My mother is my one and only mother – as mothers are – and nope, I will never be ‘prepared’, the end.

She’s okay, let’s start there.  She’s fine.  In fact, let’s end there, too.  My mother had a health scare, and she is going to be just fine.  I didn’t know if I wanted to blog at all about her experience, which is why I haven’t until now, and why I’m not providing details, because it seems voyeuristic or vicarious or something.  I’m writing about it now not because I’m fishing for – anything, really – because if I needed more help or support than I’ve received already, believe me I’d ask for it.

I’m writing about it now because of how grateful I am for it.  For the way things are turning out.

In the past two days I have been told of two different situations in which people in my community have lost loved ones.  I have cried over these losses like I cried when I wasn’t sure whether I’d lost my mother last Thursday.  The drive from Camden to Belfast’s hospital was 2,741 miles long, all of them blurry through tears.

I didn’t know either of the people who died this weekend, but I know some people who loved and cherished them.  And I grieve for them, here in the season of dying and loss, of cold and dark.  I cry because there are people anywhere, and everywhere, who are now living without people they can’t live without.  This is happening.  And it will happen to me, someday, at some point, again.

I am just grateful and painfully aware of my own happenstance.  Which is all it is.