Ingrid

Yesterday I got the phone call. Ingrid is really sick. She's been placed in palliative care, her husband said. I knew it was coming. I'd received no response to the email I'd sent her last week. Most unusual.

I met Ingrid in 2000 as a 1st year university student, shyly poking my head through the Mennonite Chaplain's office door. She loved me immediately. I kept her safely at arm's length.

Later that year when I fell sick, she visited me faithfully in the hospital. She never told me how to feel or gave me the kind of pat answers that made me want to open fire on so many perfect Christians. She just told me that she loved me and showed me that I could trust her. Always gentle.

When she retired we kept in touch. She was one of my biggest fans when I hit the road to recovery. Always cheering and believing, never judging. We created "breakfast therapy". For the price of breakfast I could throw jumbled, whacked out thoughts at her for hours and receive love and sensible advice. She would encourage me through one feeling and one bite at a time.

She loved my friends and family and spent time with them because if I loved them, she certainly did too. She never charged a penny to the people I sent her way for various things.

She told me she loved me when I couldn't say it back. She worried when I struggled despite my insistence that she shouldn't. Always asking if I was working too hard. She watched me grow from brokenness to a fragile kind of strong.

She saw me through various relationships and rejoiced at my wedding. That day she gave me a clay water jug with a letter describing the life giving qualities of water and the life she had seen grow in me. It made me cry.

Her last bout of cancer was last year, at the same time as Wendy died. I begged God to make her better. My heart couldn't handle two great losses. I wrote her a goodbye letter then and sat with her as she struggled for breath and wept as if my heart would break. She rallied and went home. But she remained weak and sickly. Our relationship changed. Visits were short and not filled with talk of my most recent struggles. I wanted to protect her, not transfer the weight on my shoulders onto her frail ones. I took the opportunity to always tell her I love her and responded to her hugs that have a way of enveloping my soul.

I've noticed my prayer has changed to "God, don't let her suffer long. And help me please". I don't know if I should go see her one more time. I don't want to be fragile, to have my heart fall out of my eyes in tears. I don't want to feel that giant Ingrid-sized void

She's going to die. And I already miss her.