Some embrace death. Others fight, grappling to pull light into the black hole death leaves in its wake. Me? I ran from it all the way to China.

The day my husband died, the bright yellow daisies outside my kitchen window seemed to wilt before my eyes. It had been seventeen months and a life’s battle lost to cancer when my husband lay dying on the sterile, white sheets of his bed. My face stained with tears, I drew in a heavy breath and nodded to my son. His eyes questioned. A moment of hesitation… with trembling hand, he twisted the black knob on the oxygen tank. Its final hiss trailed off into the quietude of death.

It has been one year since that day in spring when the last dry breath of death settled into my husband’s frail bones. The days don’t race by like they used to. They stretch out long and taut like cowhide; and the nights, short and restless, pierced with whimpers of loneliness as I lay in bed caressing the cold, unruffled man side that once radiated with warmth.

The mornings come too early with expectations I can barely face, not even over a strong cup of coffee. Another day. Another week. Every day the same. I walk out the door and drive to school.

Today, when I reach my car, a butterfly rests on the door handle, but I swish it away without a thought. At my mother’s funeral, I released a box of monarch butterflies that flew up into the air into a majestic swarm, but one fluttered down and landed on my sister’s outstretched finger while I read the poem I wrote about my mother’s life like the metamorphosis of a butterfly.

The lone butterfly didn’t seem like a coincidence, but something aethereal, deeply spiritual as if my mother’s soul had morphed into that butterfly, and there she was on my sister’s finger watching her own funeral. My mother was always a grand stander, and oh how that butterfly shone in the morning light. Since then, I say hello to butterflies as though I’m greeting my own mother. But lately, along with everything else, butterflies go unnoticed.

Since my husband’s death, my passion for teaching flickers like a dimming candle and my calling as a third-generation teacher no longer feels relevant. Thirty-eight years of teaching, each year with the impetus to make a difference in a child’s life. But in two years when I retire, that purpose will vanish and the pencil marks of those dedicated years will be erased from the annals of my long career as though they never existed. I’ll give away my prized books and projects– the life size skeleton, my sugar cube missions and starched balloon planets. I’ll close my classroom door behind me and walk away. But the next year, a new teacher, perhaps young and zealous, will print her name on my whiteboard and another cycle begins. Life goes on like this, but where am I in this strange, new place in my own life?

“Why me! Why now!” I cry out in the solitude of my office. “What will I do with the rest of my life without my soulmate!” My desperate anger demands that God hear me.

From the time I was a small child, I remember talking to God. When I knelt by my bedside to say my prayers, and when that old bully Max Carlson chased me up the hill. And as a young bride when two white doves nested on the rubber tree plant, bringing me the joy I prayed for in the depth of sorrow after yet another baby lost to miscarriage. And the time I prayed for healing after the devastating effects of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty heater and again, after the removal of a life-threatening tumor growing inside my spine. Today is no different from those many times before when I had fallen to my knees in the depth of despair. God was listening then. Surely, God is listening now?