Like the days of the pandemic, the newsfeed in my head only posted stories about Isaac’s life and death. Every plan we had together was cancelled and everything we had invested in was gone. All that was left was an unknown future. All I had were our four walls and anything in it. All I knew was that death had found our home, I had lost my main source of income and my ability to socialize in any manner that was comfortable for either party was put on hold. Besides one business class a week, I only left our home to go to the grocery store, take walks and go to the library, as books were essential to my sanity. I had become aware that something as simple as a trip to the store in the car could leave our daughter an orphan. Couples socially distanced themselves as I tried to explain that death isn’t contagious but it would inevitably infect their home one day. Others would hug their spouse a bit tighter at night because I could no longer hug mine. I stared out of the window of our life, watching the world spin around us, watching people who felt immune to death continue their lives as if nothing could happen. We knew our life would never return to the way it was before but didn’t know what our new normal would look like. We were living in limbo.

          Homeschooling also went out of the window as I couldn’t focus on any other subject than death. I knew as an adult, our daughter wouldn’t look back on this time and be thankful that she completed worksheets or achieved some kind of externally imposed learning goal. She needed to be able to say that through the crisis, just being alive, being together, was enough. Through our conversations I helped her to make sense of our new emergent topic, presenting the history that gave context to her father’s death. She was quickly introduced to a new set of vocabulary that was like nails on a chalkboard to my ears whenever she used it, words like half-orphan and life expectancy. I showed her how that not that long ago the age her dad passed at, 41, was considered average. He was also starting to get grey in his beard, so he did, in fact, reach old man status. I tried to not only give our daughter context within the whole scope of humanity but also within her own lifetime. Helping her to make sense of her own earthly experience so far, that was vastly different than any of her peers’.

          When we weren’t talking together or reading together, we played the card games she used to play with her dad, together. As we mused over how much the outcome of a game was due more to luck than skill, the conversation quickly turned into a life lesson that both of us needed.

          “You know, we don’t get to choose the cards we’re handed in life. You were very fortunate to have been born with the cards of experiencing both of your parent’s lives and now we’ve just drawn Daddy’s death from the deck,” I said.

~ Excerpt from The Invitation to Exist, Chapter “Save Our Souls”