It started in late August when my dear friend Rick died. He’d been suffering with wickedly aggressive brain cancer. He also had Parkinson’s. In September we worried that my father-in-law, who is dying of Myelodysplastic Anemia, wouldn’t survive until his 86th birthday on Sept. 23rd. He’s still alive, but fragile, and we all know that time with him is very short. In October a dear friend from my Hyde Park, Chicago, days died after a 5-year battle with a rare liver cancer. I attended his funeral and noticed that two other women friends were there – one whose teenage daughter died suddenly a few years ago and another whose 30-year-old son died last year. Then, just a few days before Halloween, a writer friend and mother of 6, became a widow at 38 when her husband died in a tragic accident on a hunting trip in Southern Utah, a terrain he knew and loved. Then this month the kind and wonderful husband of another writer friend died after his own wrestle with a particularly grievous cancer. And it’s only November 11th.

Those are the people I personally knew. That doesn’t count the six or seven deaths since late August I have heard about through the PMP Appendix Cancer (Facebook) Support Group my husband Chris and I joined after Chris barely survived his own battle with that rare and vicious disease in 2007.

May I have a reality check here? I don’t live in a war zone, and I’m not in a retirement home with only senior citizens for companions. Doesn’t this seem – dare I say it – like “over kill”? All these deaths in less than 2 ½ months?

And then there’s the other recent elephant in the room.

I really don’t know how to process all of this. Any of this. Perhaps I’m still in denial about it all. When Chris nearly died I had two years of non-stop “death is my companion” practice. I learned vivid, sobering, wrenching and spectacularly beautiful lessons about mortality. I think those lessons are still in my veins somewhere.

In the last couple days I have recognized – not in any analytical way, but in a “first reaction” way – things that keep me low and things that provide consolation, grace, hope and even joy.

One thing that does not help is to be told to shape up, quit feeling so bad, remember that it’s all part of the great eternal plan (or that there are checks and balances so get with the program). While part of the rational me gets that, the present messy, fractured part of me just needs to be what it is for a while – sad, mournful, lost, confused, grief stricken.

What helps is the reminder that Christ himself was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” I bet no one told Him to buck up. “Why are you crying, man? You of all people should know that Lazarus won’t be dead forever!”

What does help are sometimes the tiniest things. The sympathetic expression from a grocery cashier. That spectacular ruby of a maple tree in the back yard, even if its leaves are all gone in a week (See? Haunting reminders creep into even the loveliest images. Everything is so near the surface). A line of a hymn floating into my consciousness – “Where is the quiet hand to calm my anguish? Who, who can understand? He, only One.” (Thank you, Emma Lou.)

I find that the tininess is an important feature. A wisp (a whisper?) of that kind of sacred consolation often provides comfort. But sermonizing just comes on like a heavy broadcast of evangelical bad breath. A funeral with only pontificating on abstract principles when you can still smell the scent of your loved one on his hat rim in the closet?

Tell me stories. Remind me of life and laughter and joy and the essence of this dearly beloved. Elder Packer in 1996 announced, “Often the Spirit is repulsed by humorous experiences or jokes when the time could be devoted to teaching the things of the Spirit, even the sacred things.”

That does not help.

Since I have mentioned “things of the Spirit, even the sacred things,” let me share a significant event that buoyed me in the midst of this deluge of loss. That was the birth of my granddaughter, Annika Rose Kimball Ingersoll, on October 15. I watched my powerful daughter labor for a dozen hours, patient and strong (this was her third child). Eventually that little beauty Annika emerged in all her feisty glory. This time I got to cut the cord (my son-in-law was recovering from Shingles) and helped in that way to launch this spectacular new life.

Life is not just loss and grief, confusion and death – of people or dreams or love. In the midst of wailing “NO’s!!!” there are emphatic “YES’s”. In the midst of grief or racism or misogyny or brutality or bullying, there is new life and there are noble virtues and people whose lives reflect them. Do you have room for this – just a tiny space right now? If not, maybe later. It’ll wait.

At the moment my steps may be a little staggered, but I know the path I’m on. Soon, I think, I’ll be able to lend a hand. Right now it’s a little limp, but for what comfort there is in it, I offer it to you with love.