It was exactly 3 weeks ago tonight, that my family lived a nightmare. Everyday since then, I've been wishing we could wake up. We stood in a sterile, white hospital room full of monitors and medical devices and waited. Waited for our family to arrive. Waited for what the nurses had explained as the inevitable. We nervously watched the monitors that analyzed her heart rate, respiration, and blood pressure. We held her hand. We prayed. With every breath, we wondered if it would be her last.

Eventually, it came.

At that very moment, I felt peace, and my Grandma Carol appropriately reminded me it was "a peace that surpasses all understanding." She was right. Since that day, life has gone on. We have all been going through the motions of life without our Val, and for me at least, the peace has lasted. Some days I question if the peace is numbness. Is the grief festering and waiting to bubble to the surface? Maybe. It's not that I don't miss her, because I miss her so much it hurts, but I did a lot of grieving along the way. With every diagnosis, appointment, scan, and treatment there was grieving in some way.

Her passing was a deliverance from suffering, and as much as I want to be sad, I just can't be sad about that. I get angry with "the cancer" -- so angry that I actually felt (irrational) vindication that she was cremated and we literally lit that cancer up. I can't make my mind understand what happened over the course of three months. Just ten days before she passed we hunted down "Tulsa coneys" in Frisco and debated telling the owner he went too heavy on the nutmeg.

It's incomprehensible.

People were quick to remind me that everyone grieves at a different pace and there's no rule book. I will continue to believe that God will carry us through this, and he will continue to protect my heart. I have busied myself with getting our house on the market and become (borderline) obsessive with making sure the affairs of our estate are in order. I've loved on my babies and listened for her in the stillness of our days. She's always there. I hear her laugh, I see her joy, and I carry her with me always.