A Sad Day

I just learned tonight that my cousin's thirty year old daughter died. She went to the doctor a few days ago with a headache. They did a scan of her brain and found a giant inoperable tumor. She was put on life support for a day and then the plug was pulled. She leaves behind two kids, eight and two.

I feel bad writing about this but I can't think of anything more important or meaningful. It seems that if I wrote about anything else, I'd be insincere. What makes the story interesting and more sad is that her mother, my cousin has AIDS. She has had full blow AIDS since 1981, has had a number of near death experiences, but has survived and thrived for the most part for all these years. Two of her children now have died. I can't imagine how difficult that must be.

My cousin, the one with AIDS, is the daughter of my first cousin, the one who called me last week with the tip on the horse. The horse lost. I lost a couple of hundred dollars--obviously insignificant when you compare this to the loss of my second cousin.

The stock market was down almost two hundred ninety points today. Billions of dollars lost. I'm sure it caused more collective aggravation than almost anything else that happened today. My cousins, I'm sure couldn't care less.

It is getting hard for me to get away from this theme of loss. Once you start in a certain direction a momentum builds and it is difficult to reverse. I did hear a good joke today but it would be inappropriate, I think, to share it and it doesn't seem very funny right now. There are times, more than we acknowledge, when there is not much to say. I would like to point out some meaningful insight or positive lesson that we might gain from this young girl's death. I can't think of one, though. Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.