A friend lost a daughter last week. I’m guessing he’s about my age, which makes sense as his daughter was in college. I don’t have kids but I can’t imagine anything worse than the loss of a child. I’ve been through tough times, we all have: the loss of a pet, that hard breakup we thought we’d never get past, financial ruin that we thought there was no way out of. And, somehow, we survived; but this is different. I’m not going to tell you stories of her accomplishments and tell you how she was so full of promise, but she was. I never met her and I didn’t even know her name until last week. She seemed like a good kid...the kind of kid any parent would be proud of...the kind of kid who had the world by the tail and didn’t realize it; she was just living her life, until last week.
When I was going through something rough, something I thought I’d never get ahead of, it was like an 80lb pack I could never put down. I picked it up when I first woke and I didn’t set it down until eleven minutes after my head hit the pillow. But when I woke, there was that first three seconds, before I was really awake, before it all just hit me. That first three seconds was like the eye of the hurricane and everything was fine, for three seconds. On those days, I’d be thankful for the three seconds. Once I was a few minutes in, I’d look back on that first three seconds with a sense of awe and wonder and I wished the whole day could be like that...a whole day of those three seconds on a loop.
I can’t change what happened and nothing I can say would help even a little bit. But if I could wish one thing for my friend, it would be an entire lifetime of three seconds...
