More Claire

Many thanks to those of you who have been leaving comments and sending emails after reading my thoughts and memories about Claire. Not surprisingly, my days move between smiles and sorrow, tears and laughter as I talk with other friends of hers, or sit in church and sing a song whose lyrics touch me in that deeper, raw place where I am still so sad.

I've lived enough of life to know these feelings will happen for awhile, and in some ways never leave. As I told someone today after church, grief becomes a relationship in my life that I have to maintain. It's a prickly exchange at times... if I neglect this "friend" too much, it demands my attention! But occasional time and awareness, sometimes longer than others, allows it to be manageable, and actually a vessel for valuable growth.

To know and love another person so dearly, and then lose them leaves a wound that will never fully heal in this life. And honestly, I don't want that sort of wound to heal completely. I am eternally grateful for how my life has been formed and changed by my friendships with Claire and her husband Cameron. To quote the classic poem In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred, Lord Tennyson:

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.