Sickness and Meat

Posted 01/24/2017 by Taline Perez

Sergio is sick with a fever that I've been dreading would come on. The girls' were on their second round of being sick, I think from emotional and mental exhaustion. They sleep on time and still are unable to wake up in the morning like they use to. Somehow an unspoken rule has come about in our house, " You don't wake up someone who is sleeping." Maybe because we all know the exhaustion we feel and realize the other person is probably feeling the same way. So, my kids don't wake me up in the mornings either when I sleep right through the alarm. We are on a completely different time clock that is governed by emotional needs and physical necessity. So, even this business of being sick is a complicated matter because in the end, the heart governs most of our decisions. How is Sergio suppose to not let Nairi hug him, kiss him,

go up close to his face as she holds his cheeks in her little hands? He hasn't been able to do it. Or Adriné who misses so badly how she would snuggle with him every night as he read something to her or discussed some important question of the day about relationships, friendships, or another story Sergio had for them. She can't do it. Or parents visiting who are sick but want to get time with their child who they may not have much time left with? I can not hold it against him or them, and don't even know what I would do. It's just tiring to be the "police" all the time and the caregiver. And yet I do it gladly, a little like parenting. I've been thinking about how to best describe the ongoing pain and tiredness (on all levels). This is what I came up with. I hate tearing meat apart. I'm not sure why because there are plenty of others things that don't bother me at all. But have you ever tried to rip a piece of beef apart with your hands? This is like that. You pull, yank, put all your strength into it and it never works. You will never be able to rip it apart. You may even try to dig into it in an effort to catch a weak spot you can tear. It's not meant to be ripped apart. This cancer is like that motion of being pulled apart individually and from Sergio. It just never stops, so you finally give in to the fact that this is just how it is going to feel until a sudden heavy cut does sever you apart. I don't know which is better (and I am extremely relieved I am not in charge of that decision). The constant gnawing or a clean cut. But there is a reason for everything. Reasons that go far beyond my own pain and knowledge. Perhaps for my kids, for someone else I am not even aware of, or even for me for a reason I may realize later since I stand frazzled and "dear" like in the lights of an oncoming car right now, for whatever reason I need to be going through this and whatever God is revealing of himself to Sergio it is all God's timing. Thank God. I thank God for the pain I feel because it comes from a good place. It comes from and because of the love I have experienced and experience with Sergio. I thank God because He is Living and real and answers my prayers from the smallest details to the biggest challenges we have, and not from where you think it would come.I can not make any sense of it. I thank God that He is a provider, a loving Father, and has us in His hands. God is nothing like most of us and yet he can use all of us for good. My God will never leave me or forsake me. "Wherefore we faint not; but though our outward man is decaying, yet our inward man is renewed day by day. For our light affliction, which is for the moment, worketh for us more and more exceedingly an eternal weight of glory; while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal." 2nd Corinthians 4:16-18 Taline Perez

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