Break

The last time I shared my thoughts and feelings to the world via my blog seems so long ago, and I promise that it was not an intentional hiatus.  The title of this post seems very apropos, since in addition to my school and blogging break, many things have broken these past two weeks, and my heart was one of them.

Easter vacation for me is pretty normal, minus the triathlon that is Easter week madness.  Between Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday, the Roman Catholic celebration of Easter definitely can be exhausting, and this year was no different.

I don't really want to get into details, for the mere reason that that's not what this post is intended to be about.  That being said, my father started feeling much worse than normal right around Wednesday, April 1st, and his spirit left us around 3:55 am on Saturday, April 4th.  Obviously, that changed a lot about my break, and I guess this post is mostly to share with you all- or at least attempt to- what is going on inside my head.

For those of you that don't know me very well, I tend to be a pretty spiritual person.  I try to make it to church on a regular basis and be an active part of the services.  I'm not going to engage in a philosophical debate at this time regarding my religious beliefs, but I'll summarize it similarly to how I silenced one of my interrogative boyfriends: I worship because, at the end of the service, I feel like a better, more complete person.  Agree.  Disagree.  That's cool, I'm not going to judge because we all have our beliefs, but this post will make more sense if you just know that about me.  Cool?  Ok.

For those of you biblically minded, you can appreciate my connection that the most painful day of my father's life, and the last full one at that, was on Good Friday, and also that just prior to Easter Triduum, my father was in the hospital for three days.  I couldn't seem to shake the fact that this was not a coincidence, and if you know me at all, you know I don't believe in coincidences.  Despite that 24-hour period being, to date, the most emotionally draining day of my life, I would like to believe that the fact that it happened to be Good Friday was for me to be able to find some comfort in my father's suffering.  He was not alone.

But it goes deeper than that.  Because my father had no salivary glands from the radiation and chemotherapy from his first cancer 10 years ago, he often took a tiny sponge swab and rinsed his mouth out with water when it got unusually dry.

For those not understanding the relation: prior to Christ's crucifixion, the soldiers soaked a hyssop branch in wine and offered it to Jesus because he thirsted.  It's not exactly the same thing, but as my dad was being hydrated with these little pink sponges merely hours before he passed, I shuddered at the eeriness of the connection.