“I will have nothing to do with a God who cares only occasionally. I need a God who is with us always, everywhere, in the deepest depths as well as the highest heights. It is when things go wrong, when good things do not happen, when our prayers seem to have been lost, that God is most present. We do not need the sheltering wings when things go smoothly. We are closest to God in the darkness, stumbling along blindly.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

Oh God, I am in the darkness, stumbling along blindly. Filled with pain and sadness. Life is just so unfair. Who out there in the cosmos decides who gets Pancreatic cancer and who doesn't? Who successfully comes through a lung transplant and who doesn't? Why does it hurt so much? Why do I feel as though I am taking the loss of Tony worse than the loss of my own Father? Has it all just snowballed and this is the final, damp conclusion? I don't even know anymore.

Last year, on September 21st my Father lost his battle against Pancreatic Cancer. And this last Tuesday on November 15th Tony Roth lost his battle against his new lungs.

His funeral is on Saturday, and I am so incredibly torn. I want to be there. He was almost a second father to me, for as short a period of time as I knew him. I KNOW that my sister Rose considered him her second father. She and Johnny celebrated their 1 year anniversary just a little over a month ago. So within almost a month on either side of their anniversary they have the anniversary of their Father's deaths. How much does that suck.

I was all set to drive to Chicago tomorrow (from Central OH) and hitch a ride with my brother, his family and my mother. But then I have to choose, do I want to be there now? Or do I want to be able to spend a longer period of time with my family over thanksgiving. I can't afford to do both. AND IT SUCKS!

It sucks that you realize that someone meant so much more to you than you had thought only when they are no longer with you. And as much as I try right now, to picture Tony up in Heaven with Daddy I'm left with a knot in my throat and a headache from crying. I didn't cry this much when Dad died. Why am I crying so much now?

With Dad, when Mom told me, I think that it was almost a sense of relief that I felt. I had been there, watching him slowly disappear. The Cancer had taken so many things away from him. In the end it left him lying on a hospital bed in our dining room.

That last night, he was semi-concious and was moaning, terribly afraid and alone in his suffering. During my watch, I sat by his bed, and held his hand and read to him from the Psalms just so that he could hear my voice and know that I was there with him.

I didn't get to say goodbye to Tony. At least I was able to have Dad tell me that he loved me one last time before he slipped away from us.

I've been reading lately, trying to figure myself out. Even before I was told that Tony was as bad as he was, I was struggling. I was sitting in a funk. I didn't want to write, I didn't want to be around people, I didn't really want anything. I just wanted to be left alone in a bubble. So I picked up Madeleine L'Engle's A Circle of Quiet and began to read where I had left off. I also started to reread the chronicling of another woman's journey to find peace and balance within herself (Eat, Pray, Love).

I went to the Delaware Resevoir and sat on the end of the boat ramp and read as the crisp autumn wind tore at my hair and made me wish I had a scarf on. Then I returned, and stood on the end of the same boat ramp and was buffeted by winds with gusts of up to 40 mph while singing into the wind and the waves. I sang the Lord's Prayer, How Great Thou Art and It is Well.

I found quotes from some of my favorite authors (Madeleine predominately) that seemed to strike upon the precice string of my feelings, like a harpist plucking a melody out of her instrument.

But tonight, as I am realizing that I won't be there for my sister this Saturday, none of that is making me feel any better.

Yet, even as I laugh bitterly at these, they still inspire me and speak to me through a language that I do not understand. I am standing here, crying out to God: I am here, what did you design me for? What is it that you want me to be doing? Who did you design me to be?

Event though I do not hear anything, he is speaking to me. Though I may choose not to listen at this time. He has knit me together in my mother's womb. I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

So, tonight I write this for Tony Roth and for my Father, Bill Wetherington. I loved you both, a lot. And I regret that I didn't have the time to show you what you meant to me. I miss you both so much, and I can only pray that someday we will all be together again. Until then, I can only hope that God will continue to speak to me through whatever vessels he chooses. And I will try to listen.

“It's hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we're left with a fistful of ashes.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth." ~Madeleine L'Engle

“The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.” ~ Madeleine L'Engle

“Maybe you have to know the darkness before you can appreciate the light.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle, A Ring of Endless Light

“Believing takes practice.” ~ Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“We are all strangers in a strange land, longing for home, but not quite knowing what or where home is. We glimpse it sometimes in our dreams, or as we turn a corner, and suddenly there is a strange, sweet familiarity that vanishes almost as soon as it comes.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

“It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

“We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

“I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright,
And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years,
Driven by the spheres,
Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world
And all her train were hurled.” ~Henry Vaughn

“There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness: as men here
Say it is late and dusky, because they
See not all clear.
O for that Night, where I in him
Might live invisible and dim.” ~ Henry Vaughn

“Like it or not, we either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“How long your closet held a whiff of you,
Long after hangers hung austere and bare.
I would walk in and suddenly the true
Sharp sweet sweat scent controlled the air
And life was in that small still living breath.
Where are you? since so much of you is here,
Your unique odour quite ignoring death.
My hands reach out to touch, to hold what's dear
And vital in my longing empty arms.
But other clothes fill up the space, your space,
And scent on scent send out strange false alarms.
Not of your odour there is not a trace.
But something unexpected still breaks through
The goneness to the presentness of you.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle, The Ordering of Love: The New and Collected Poems of Madeleine L'Engle

“George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“It is not always on the great or the important that the balance of the universe depends.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle

“Our whole business therefore in this life is to restore to health the eye of the heart whereby God may be seen.”
― St. Augustine of Hippo

“No wonder our youth is confused and in pain; they long for God, for the transcendent, and they are offered, far too often, either piosity or sociology, neither of which meets their needs, and they are introduced to churches which have become buildings that are a safe place to go to escape the awful demands of God.”
~ Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet

I salute you. I am your friend and my love for you goes deep. There is nothing I can give you which you have not got. But there is much, very much, that while I cannot give it, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in today. Take heaven! No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in this present little instance. Take peace! The gloom of the world is but a shadow. Behind it, yet within our reach, is joy. Take joy! Life is so full of meaning and purpose, so full of beauty . . . that you will find earth but cloaks your heaven. Courage then to claim it, that is all! . . . And so I greet you, with profound esteem and with the prayer that for you, now and forever, the day breaks and the shadows flee away.
"Letter to a Friend" by Fra Giovanni, 1513

“If there ever comes a day when we can’t be together, keep me in your heart, I’ll stay there forever.” ~Winnie the Pooh

Piglet: How do you spell love?
Pooh: You don’t spell it, you feel it.

“The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears or the sea.” (I took this one from Anna's pinterest board. Don't know the author)

Love me when I deserve it the least, that’s when I really need it. ~Swedish Proverb

All the chisels I've dulled carving idols of stone
That have crumbled like sand 'neath the waves.
I've recklessly built all my dreams in the sand just to watch, them all wash away.

Through another day, another trial, another chance to reconcile
To one who sees past all I see.
And reaching out my weary hand I pray that you'd understand
You're the only one who's faithful to me.

All the pennies I've wasted in my wishing well
I have thrown like stones to the sea.
I have cast my lots, dropped my guard, searched aimlessly for a faith
To be faithful to me.

Through another day, another trial, another chance to reconcile
To one who sees past all I see.
And reaching out my weary hand I pray that you'd understand
You're the only one who's faithful to me.
You're the only one who's faithful to me.
~Jenifer Knapp "Faithful to Me"

Don’t know how it is You looked at me
And saw the person that I could be
Awakening my heart
Breaking through the dark
Suddenly Your grace
Like sunlight burning at midnight
Making my life something so
Beautiful, beautiful
Mercy reaching to save me
All that I need
You are so
Beautiful, beautiful
Now there’s a joy inside I can’t contain
But even perfect days can end in rain
And though it’s pouring down
I see You through the clouds
Shining on my face
Like sunlight burning at midnight
Making my life something so
Beautiful, beautiful
Mercy reaching to save me
All that I need
You are so
Beautiful, beautiful
I have come undone
But I have just begun
Changing by Your grace
Like sunlight burning at midnight
Making my life something so
Beautiful, beautiful
Mercy reaching to save me
All that I need
You are so
Beautiful, beautiful
~Francesca Battistelli "Beautiful Beautiful"

To whoever makes it through all of my quotations, thank you. I needed to say this, for myself. For Tony. And most of all for my Daddy.