Story without an Ending

I think one reason I feel so empty, so desolate, so hopeless is that with the death of my Mom, my own story seems to be over ... a story without an ending ... a "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

By Faith I bow my head before the Teachings of the Church that all life has meaning; that even a sparrow will not drop from the sky without our Lord knowing and taking note of even such a loss.

But it just doesn't feel that way.

You know, I can see, now, why the traditional investment of so much emotion and energy and meaning is in the Family. I'll swear, I could really get into being a traditional Medici or Colonna ... member of a large House, in which advancement of the Family becomes the primary enterprise of this large, extended familias. The Family carries on the Story that is theirs.

I know I know I know. That may be in some sense "natural" but it's also a guise for the Enemy. "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil." Such a view of Family is surely the Temptation of the World.

But still. Mom is gone. I am so deeply grateful for her. But now she is gone. And I have nobody. I live alone. My father has been gone for decades. I have no wife. I have no children. My sister is estranged. My aging aunt is kind but as she will be the first to say, she has her limits. My cousins have their own lives.

I'm alone. And my story, such as it is, is an empty soliloquy for which there is no audience but myself.

Except the Church of course is my family. Mary is my Mother. Jesus is my Brother. The Church Triumphant is my enormous Extended Family stretched through time.

But in the Here and Now ... I find myself again fairly distant and uninvolved. No one's to blame but me for this of course. But still there it is.

O God have mercy on me. And God let her Rest in Peace.