Brave Kate

When I think about how the year has played out I can’t help but see it in the context of the people I’ve met. Recently, I’ve met an incredibly brave woman, her name is Kate. Her husband is young, like she is. He’s dying of cancer. It’s a loathsome disease. They have two young boys, beautifully handsome boys. My heart sinks, watching as one does, helplessly from the sidelines as this disease ravages their father’s life with each passing day.

How do you speak to the silent pain in another’s eyes without deepening it? Without feeling that if you (one more person) asks them how they are might unwittingly be the reason they fall beneath waves of pain and not be able to come up for air. Where is the life raft kept aboard this huge ship, sailing it would seem on the high seas of this loathsome disease. Where are they when you need them?

When I last spoke to Kate, she looked drained, her normally sparkling eyes seemed troubled, inward looking and as if by some monumental effort she wrenched from deep within herself the something extra she felt I needed to put me at ease. Me. Maybe she doesn’t even realise she does that, but she does. It’s almost instinctual. Something she feels she must do to others before they can do it to her because perhaps she thinks they’d be doing it because they felt sorry for her.

Have you ever wondered how we get brave? What it is you think that characterises one person as being braver than the next one? I don’t know exactly. All I do know however, is that my friend Kate is brave. Brave and kind and caring to the rest of us when we would like to be that for her.

So, if you pray some time, any time will you send a prayer heavenward for my friend Kate, she needs my prayers and yours, she just might not realise how much right now. And thank you, from the bottom of my heart.