The Sky is Too Blue

Sorry for the lack of posts, especially the one with pictures and happy blogger news.  Friday night my world was rocked, in a bad way.  My dear friend Yancy was shot in a random, senseless act of violence.  He was sitting in his car at a stoplight when a car drove up next to him and open fired.  He died of gunshots to the throat, head and chest.

I am still trying to wrap my head around this while my heart explodes with grief.  I have had friends pass before, but when someone dies so suddenly and so violently there is a wrongness there that makes it so much harder to process.  That wrongness slips into your heart and tries to settle there, leaving inky black dust everywhere it touches.  Anger, grief, rage.  I struggle to find the sweet spot again, even while laying with my sweet child on my lap and my loving husband at my side.  Rather than wanting to hold them tighter, I want to push them away, to let the blackness of Yancy's untimely death wrap itself around my tender heart and shield it from pain.  To dip down where there is nothing to lose, nothing to grieve, nothing to give.

I will fight this.  It's part of the process.  As are the tears and the anger and the disbelief.  It seems impossible on this gorgeous late summer day that we should be dealing with such a hole in our hearts.  I am going to try and make it to the barn today to give my pony a scratch.  I don't feel much like riding (and I strained my neck so I shouldn't ride anyway) but pony necks are great sponges for tears, and I have a lot of those to share.

Yancy was not a horse person, but he was an outdoorsman.  Hiker, mountain climber, back country skier, Yancy jumped out of an airplane earlier this year to celebrate living life to it's fullest.  He would be the first one to say to go out and do it.  Try something new.  Push yourself harder.  He used to say that life was too short to waste...and he was right.