My Family After Tragedy

  The most difficult aspect of losing a spouse is keeping the daily sanity balance.   We all experience this in different ways and there is no prescription or magic recipe to make things better all of a sudden.  It is not possible.  You might hear from friends and family members that one needs to move on, that there is nothing we can do, that life on earth is for the living, and so on.  I understand the words but what I feel, based on my own experience is hard, it hurts.  We live through all of these, but it is a balancing act. It is especially challenging for parents.   We have two daughters, they are 18 and 21 years old.  No one is ready to lose their mother at an early age.  For them, it continues to be very difficult.  I have noticed that they grieve differently.  One of them has addressed the loss of her mother head-on while the other embraced the situation stoically by herself.   I did not try to change her mind but after almost two years of losing our beloved she finds it diffic

  Every morning when I open my eyes, the first thing I see is a picture of Christina on my night table. She is smiling and looking at me. I remember clearly taking that picture.  The picture gives me a familiar warm feeling.  Back in 1993, after escaping Canada to avoid deportation, under a leafy Floridian tree on a sunny afternoon, I was getting ready to write my first letter to Christina from the USA.  I had so many things to tell her but my hand had refused to write.   Then, with a very soft movement, I placed a dot in the middle of the page, followed by another dot, then another, and another, and another, and a rain of dots flooded the page with a chaotic cadence to make sense only later.  As the dot madness intensified a picture of Christina and me started to emerge.  After a while, in the same way I started this creation my hand stopped.   I looked at the picture and loved it, like a parent loves the first sight of a born child, signed it, and put it in the mail.  No words, only