Here it comes, another wave of grief. I am starting to feel physically ill. There is no explaining it.

My grandmother and I went to a member of our church's house for lunch. She has a son a couple of years younger than me, and her husband died about the same time as Mum, also of cancer. It so happens that one of my good friends from church's father is currently in a coma in intensive care, almost exactly a year after we were going through a similar experience. We were talking a bit about this current man, and a bit about our experiences a year ago. Being people who understand what you've gone through, you don't exactly have to hold back your conversation and it just all dredged it up again. I'm feeling really bad for my friend. The situation is not yet definitely hopeless, but it's not necessarily hopeful either and the thought that she's going through the same thing I went through makes me remember all these details about what it was like... I just can't handle it.

I think when someone so close to you gets cancer or some serious illness like that, you lose your childhood. I was 13 when Mum got cancer and I can hardly remember what life was like before then. For Murray, the boy whose house I went to, he was probably about 7 or 8 when his father first got sick, and it was worse for them, as there were many, many times it seemed like his father was going to be gone in a few months. And then there's the fact that the majority of the world's children lose their childhood in some way, through starvation or the scourge of AIDS or other terrible things. What does it really mean to be a child? People say it means to be carefree, to play, to be imaginative, to see the world with fresh eyes... but I would say that the majority of children experience life in a very different way. How terrible life is, and yet we cling on to it.

Another couple at our church had a horrible week when their first grandchild was born and failed to start breathing. In some ways I have to think that that baby is lucky; never to have to go through the pain of life. Yet there is something we find so terrible about the death of a child (unless, of course, it is "aborted", the one practice I have no question marks about in agreeing with the conservative Right). Why is that? When life sucks so much, why am I glad I was ever born? Sometimes I wish I hadn't been, but then there is this almost immediate revulsion within me at the idea of not existing, and not finding God, and not experiencing his love. So - life is worth living. I don't think that while I live I'll ever completely and steadfastly understand why, though.