Love Akwardly With All Your Might

A little over a year ago, I wrote a post about my dear friend Judy's nephew Louis who was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. The doctors gave him two months. With the help of chemotherapy and donations from folks (like some of you) he made it over a year. Judy wrote to tell me that he left us on Monday night.

There are moments the world feels like it conspires to shower us with miracles and gifts that you never expected. I think Louis was one of those to gifts to his mother and to his aunt and to the family around him. Then there are the moments that just don't make sense to go up against the grain of what seems right and this is what his cancer has been like. This is what it is like to say good-bye to him. I don't understand and I never will and frankly, I don't think I want to.

There is a lot I want to say about Judy and her sister Rachel, Louis' brave mom, but this isn't the time. Instead, I want to share what Judy so beautifully wrote in her blog post about saying goodbye to Louis--I think it says it all:

When you love someone, you will never feel like you are doing it right. You will think that you can’t love strong enough or well enough or gracefully enough. You will think that you can’t love them as much as they deserve to be loved and that you can’t love them perfectly.

And it’s true, you can’t.

So offer up your clumsy and imperfect love. Offer it late, offer it cracked and scratched and unwieldy. Offer it with trembling hands and faltering feet. Open your flawed and tarnished heart, and love awkwardly with all your might.

You will never regret telling the people you love how much they mean to you. So blush and look at your feet while you tell them. Tell them when its embarrassing. Tell them when they are sleeping. Tell them when you say goodbye.

Just love them. That’s the best you can do.

The last time I saw Louis was at our friend Andromeda's wedding and he was dancing. He was healing from his second battle with cancer, and it showed, but never the less he stood in a half circle of other friends and swung his arms wide in a circle. Judy remarked later that she hadn't seen him so well in a long time. It is to his memory and to the dance that we all must do in our own time that I say, swing wide Louis. Traveling mercies. You are loved and always will be.