---

April Tenth.

It's April 10. Three years ago today my niece Katie was killed in a car accident. She was 18 years old, the oldest of my 13 nieces and nephews, and I thought today of how she was the first baby that I knew well from infancy.


Hers were the first diapers that I changed, the first stroller that I pushed, and the first tot to win me over so much that a little spit-up didn't send me running. I sit now in the same room where I heard the news, and consider how her loss must be ever tough for my sister and her family to take. A big part of their daily life, abruptly gone. I can hardly even fathom what it must be like to lose your own child.


We are all going to die someday, and we typically don't know when. Most of the time, we'd rather not consider death, and the bright light it shines on the difference between the temporal and the eternal.


I have always liked C.S. Lewis' writing about the eternal, in both his fiction and non-fiction works. Today I appreciated his words in The Problem of Pain, where he writes:


"...perhaps, by God's grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature conciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. "


I also read a great piece by Halley Suitt, ("When My Dad Wakes Up Today") whose father passed away yesterday. Touching and imaginative, a nice reminder of how the joys of life on earth are experienced through people, not things.