This Is The Day

Browsing blogs the other day, I came across a sentence written by a man whose wife is dying of cancer. I can't find the blog, I can't find the exact quote, but it boils down to "This is the day which The Lord has made. It must be, because I would not have made a day like this." 

It stuck. I read it for the first time as the nice oxygen lady came for the last time, to unhook the concentrator from the great long line, to wrestle the giant cylinders from the depths of the wardrobe, to pack up the mini cylinders and the chargers, and to leave me with a hole and a pile of gently used tubing. 

I pondered on it as the nice man from Millbrook came to dismantle the bed and heave it into his bus. And as the courier came to pick up the feed pump. 

And it came back into my mind powerfully this morning, as I sat in the short pew, in the space beside the gap marked out with gaffer tape on the floor, arms empty and nowhere to hang my bag. 

I did not choose this. 

I did not choose not to be exhausted by the end of every day. I did not choose to have more space in my house. I did not choose to have an only child. It was not my choice to be able to sit through a meal uninterrupted, to sleep without listening for seizures, to sit at home in an empty house, and for this to be the norm not a special treat. Yet this is the day that The Lord has made. 

I did not choose to ache with longing to hold my girl just one more time. I did not choose these empty, relaxing hours. I did not choose this pain. But this is the day that The Lord has made, and I would choose this all over again, because all these exhausting stressful confusing days were so completely worth it. 

I would not have made a day like this. I would not have made a day like any of the four weeks since Imi died. I probably wouldn't have made many of the days in the past few years either. But I wouldn't want to be without them. 

Hard, but beautiful. Polished diamond days in memory. I remember. Shining bright, and stabbing pain. Hard. But beautiful. 

And it occurs to me that I would not have created many of the days we had together. I would not have created days watching Imi struggling to breathe, days counting the minutes between morphine doses, earlier days waiting for surgeries to finish and counting the minutes until we were together again. But they were the days with The Lord made, and they are days I treasure now; times we shared, when my heartbeat child was with me still. Days I would not have edited out of her life, for then her life would have been measured in weeks and months, not the years we were blessed with. 

This is the day that The Lord has made. Let me find a way to rejoice and be glad in it. 

Tia