Just pray!

I don’t even know how to write about this, what to say. Am I hearing a beeping sound? Has that Mack truck backed up and hit the accelerator to crush this family yet again? Surely I have tread marks across my back.

Two days ago my nephew Jasen was badly hurt in a car crash. He was in the passenger seat of a car that plowed into a tree on a dark, curvy country road. Jasen was pinned in the car and it took rescue workers two hours to get him out. They rushed him to the Maryland Shock-Trauma Center in Baltimore. Two days later, he’s still in a coma and he has a broken shoulder and a broken leg and he’s on a ventilator. My sister-in-law is sitting at Jasen’s side in the intensive care unit without her husband. Jasen’s father, my brother Mark, was murdered by his next-door neighbor a little over a year ago.
 
I’m in catastrophe overload. Honestly, I need the support of my friends and people at my church, but in a sense I don’t want to tell anyone any more of my bad news. I want to cover my ears and hide under the bed when the phone rings. I’ve experienced so much misfortune in the past two years that it’s almost embarrassing, as if there’s some sort of black cloud, a voodoo curse, a swirling vortex of muck surrounding me. This is not really my life, is it? My father died, my brother was murdered, my dear friend Mike got mesothelioma and died. We had to go through the murder trial. Last week my mother fell and spent two days in the hospital and now we’ve been told she has a “mass” in her lung/liver area that has to have a biopsy. And now Jasen is clinging to life in intensive care.

I’m already on my knees from the sheer shock of all of this so I might as well stay there and pray. I pray kneeling and standing and leaning against the wall and driving the car and sitting on the basement floor while I paint furniture. It’s really the only useful thing I can do. I pray.