I haven't posted here since before John died nearly two years ago. The second anniversary of his death is coming up the end of February. I'm remembering that two years ago at this time we learned that his pancreas and liver were full of cancer. We were hopeful that chemotherapy might give us at least a year. He was dead in less than two months. It just took him. And I watched, helpless to do anything about it. We couldn't even really manage his nausea, his pain or his dramatic weight loss. It was even too much for the oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering. So, he became an in-patient there for the last 12 days of his life and they worked tirelessly to give him relief.

I'm remembering all this, re-living the desperation, grasping any thread of hope we could find. We went to see "True Grit" together on our 27th anniversary, December 31, 2010. I fixed his favorite meal to celebrate, but he only took a few bites. He was full, a sinister side effect of pancreatic cancer. It simulates the feeling of being full before you can eat enough to be nutritionally sustained.

John wore his Marine Corps baseball cap as they wheeled him into the MSK emergency room for the last time. I'm hearing the van driver's voice call him, "Captain" reverently, respectfully as he carefully lowered John into the wheel chair, trying not to cause any more pain.

"Captain" "O Captain, My Captain" Whitman's poem and another respectful and reverent use of the word associated with death and dying. I'm feeling a calm sorrow today as the end of Christmastide approaches. Yet, I'm taking the advice of Dietrich Bonhoeffer who even at the end of his Nazi imprisonment encouraged his loved ones to "Be joyful in the Lord..." And so that is my prayer and my psalm today. It gives me hope and lifts me up - this reason for joy - God's love for us manifested in the child we call Jesus.