Walking Each Other to the Edge of Heaven

Grief feels different when you can see it coming. It’s not a sudden storm, it’s a slow, steady tide rising at your feet, inching higher every day while you stand there helpless, knowing you can’t hold it back. I’m preparing to say goodbye to the love of my life, and nothing in my faith, my heart, or my body feels ready for that. How could it?

His cancer has spread. He has chosen to stop treatment, not out of defeat, but out of a quiet, holy courage I don’t know if I’ll ever fully understand. He’s at peace with his decision, and there’s a strange ache in watching someone you love find peace in the same moment you feel your own world collapsing.

In the next few weeks, hospice will begin. I keep trying to pray, but most days my prayer is just a trembling,[/quote] Sometimes it feels like the only thing I have left to offer.

As Catholics, we’re taught about redemptive suffering, about Christ meeting us in the places where love and pain blur together. But watching someone you love fade is a kind of suffering you can’t theologize your way out of. It lives in your chest. It steals your breath. It changes the way you see every sunrise and every ordinary moment.

I’m asking God for just one thing now: that he is free from pain. That whatever time we have left, days, weeks, moment, are merciful, gentle, full of tenderness instead of fear. And if we have to say goodbye, I pray for the strength to let him go without breaking in a way I can’t come back from.

I pray, too, that when his time comes, he feels the arms of God around him more clearly than he feels the sickness in his body. That he knows he is loved beyond measure, by me, by our family, and by the God who has walked with him through every valley.

I keep thinking of the saints who wrote about the “dark night,” and how faith sometimes survives not by shining, but by refusing to go out. That’s where I am: holding onto a flicker. Trusting that God is here, even when everything feels shadowed. Trusting that love does not end, even when a life does.

If we have to say goodbye… I pray we find the strength to do it. And I pray that afterwards, when the house feels too quiet and the world feels too bi, God will gather the pieces of us and carry what we can’t.

This is the hardest prayer I’ve ever had to make.
But I’m making it anyway.
Because love deserves that much.