Day 4,058
Becky recently read Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt by Ben Reeves and recommended it to me. Over the past three nights I’ve consumed it, deeply moving on a few levels.
One of the quotes really hit home as I read it last night, I just had to save it:
Ben Reeves, Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
She holds them tight. She smells their hair. She remembers Layla when she was Neda’s age, when they lived in the old flat, and how terrifyingly fast it’s all gone, and she thinks about how old Layla will be when Neda is Layla’s age, and how quickly that will go too. And it hurts, and it swells in her chest like the panic of drowning, but she breathes, and she squeezes them tighter. She knows this moment – this precious clarity, this twenty-minute gift – this moment right now, just sitting with her children is everything she will ever miss.
This evening Becky, the boys, and I all hopped on FaceTime for over an hour of talking, joking, connecting, and existing with each other.
In every way it was perfectly ordinary, nothing unusual.
In every way it was a moment of complete presence, of the connection of my family, a moment of shared love.
The moments of love and presence with my family I will miss most when my time is up. I will miss them, but I’m even more grateful that they happen so often that they seem ordinary in-spite of their extraordinariness. Without a doubt the best moments of my life.
Thanks!!!
