Iris

"Life is not always fair. Sometimes you get a splinter even sliding down a rainbow." ~Terri Guillemets

It was one of those weekends when I spent too many hours trying to make sense of the senseless. Geraldine's sister is still hanging in, riddled with cancer and wracked with pain and at fifty-seven, way too young to be spending her last days this way. I spent time with my mom yesterday. She wasn't having a good day. She was vacant and drooling and unable to connect to the event of my presence. Mom will be ninety years old in just a few short months. Physically, she is still strong, the heart of a lion. It's hard to understand why Bev is, so soon, slipping away from the world while my mom continues to survive but I long ago accepted that in these cases, God works in mysterious ways.

What threw me into a tail-spin was an email from my friend Stephen, received in the wee hours of Sunday morning. Stephen and I have been friends for thirty years. He and his wife Iris were guests at our wedding, themselves marrying a couple of years after Merv and I did. They were well suited and happy - both athletic, outdoorsy, beautiful people and the parents of four blonde sons including two from Stephen's first marriage. Stephen sent an email from New Zealand, where he and Iris were flying to for a scheduled stop on their way to Australia to spend a family vacation with one of Stephen's sons who moved there a few years ago and Iris's brother who lives in Brisbane. Iris died on the plane shortly before it landed in Aukland. She seemed to have fainted and was quickly attended to by some doctors on the flight. She showed some improvement but then her condition worsened and attempts to revive her were unsuccessful. So now Stephen is in New Zealand, dealing with all that must be dealt with to bring Iris home.

Iris Schmidt - wife, mother, daughter, sister, employee, athlete. Young. Beautiful. Full of life. Gone.

No matter how hard I try, I can't make sense of that.