It started with my mom's cow, who lost her calf (stillborn) in a difficult calving. It got worse with the loss of my uncle this week to Covid 19. This stuff is brutal.

It is hard to wrap your wits around times like this, and losing a family member who has been taken for granted. It is surreal and seems pretend. Most days I wake up and think, that didn't really happen, did it? But sadly, here we are.

My aunt and uncle both got Covid 19, presumably from my uncle's job at the courthouse. He was a state trooper for many years before this. He was 73 years old and in good health. My aunt was getting through it, and Uncle Dave seemed to be as well, till my Aunt Mary checked his oxygen one day and found it was low, so he went into the hospital. He went to the ICU after a bit, then came out and seemed to be doing better, talking on the phone and texting. And then he crashed, back into the ICU and onto a ventilator, and shortly after that they found he had kidney failure and heart damage, and they knew he wasn't going to pull through.

Aunt Mary by that time had been fever free long enough for her to go into the hospital to say goodbye after getting this news. That's the bit that beaks my heart. He passed the next evening, on the new moon.

And so here we are. I didn't mean to make this post all about that, or to spread around sadness. It's more about how surreal it is when what seem to be abstract threats touch your own life. It is one thing to hear about it on the news, and to wear a mask to the grocery store, but another to lose someone, who would be alive and well today if not for this pandemic.

My two other uncles are Lutheran ministers and they both have youtube channels now, in the time of Covid. Which makes good sense. They are good pastors too, well spoken, decent, and kind.

One of these uncles posted a video, with a caption mentioning his brother's impending demise. The video was about the conflict of two quotes.

Martinus von Biberach:

I live, and don't know how long.
I'll die, and don't know when.
I'm going, and don't know where.
I wonder how I can be so happy.

I come - but don't know where I com from.
I go - but don't know where I am going.
It's amazing that I can be so happy.

Apparently Martin Luther hated this saying. He prefered this altered version:

I live, as long as God wants.
I'll die, when and how God wants.
I'm going, and certainly know where.
I wonder how I can be miserable.

I come - and know perfectly well where I come from.
I go - and know perfectly well where I am going.
It's amazing that I can be so miserable.

I feel that this dichotomy sums it up beautifully. Though those two gentlemen, and my uncle, mean it in a Christian context, I think it suits any sppiritual framework. The human grief and profound loss, for my father, for my late uncle's wife and sons, and for my whole family, is deep. But as a spiritual person, I know that Uncle Dave is onto his next adventure, most likely he'll be a new baby one of these days, and grow up to be raucus and causing trouble, like the lovable, snarky grouch he was in this life. And that gives me comfort.

It may sound funny, coming from a pagan, but I found that I needed to pray to God and to Jesus in the midst of this crisis. I felt that as a member of my family, I needed to speak to the gods of my family. And I find as a pantheist, that I believe in Everyone. I haven't forsaken God or Jesus, even when I feel that Frigg speaks to me more clearly in my own life.

I have been doing my best to not fall too deep into over-empathizing. Empathy is a good quality, clearly. But I have a tendency to extrapolate too minutely, exactly, how I'd feel losing my own husband of 53 years, and that becomes counter productive. I am trying to grieve for myself and lend support to my aunt, not put myself fully in her shoes. I sent her a silk cloth that I painted and a letter telling her about the dream I had of Uncle Dave walking down the road with Jesus. (That was a night of profound dreams). My Mom and I have a plan to send her a German Chocolate cake in a month or so, after things go back "to normal," so she doesn't feel so alone at that time. And probably some gift or nice thing once a month for the next year.

What makes it stranger is doing IVF in the midst of that loss. Not to mention in the midst of a pandemic, an election season, and a Trump administration. I am deep in the hormones now, and that doesn't feel real either. I have a few more days of shots and then the egg harvest - I mean retrieval. Harvest does sound better, though, doesn't it? More entertaining if it sounds like an alien process somehow. It feels like an alien process, so might as well make fun of that fact.

I am trying to have faith in the wholeness of the universe. That my Aunt Mary can still find joy in whatever way she needs to, that Uncle Dave is in good hands in his next life, protected by Jesus. That our children are making their way to us through the path they need to take.

The more strange the world is, the more I feel the need to keep faith that there is goodness. To make it a prayer for people to find their ways and to have a compass pointed toward decency. I don't take these things for granted. I think we are at a time of reckoning with social media, demagoguery, news and propaganda, wild narratives loose in the world that seems crazy, but have consequences. And yet for the sake of my own sanity, I fall back on faith that for those lost there is still peace, fun, and redemption to be had. And that in bringing children into the world, there will still be good things to be had. I have to hold onto the faith that we as a country and a world will come out of this reckoning in a better way.

I have been sleeping a lot, because hormones and feelings take a lot of energy. I have now to reconnect with Spirit and my own gods. to keep my own faith live. I need to protect that space to bring my children into a good home. Snuggle my cats, dog and husband, and be thankful for the small things. The opposite of huge tragedy is small happinesses sometimes. As illustrated by the Two of Chalices tarot card I just drew, signifying love, partnership, balance, harmony. For all that I am thankful.