“Tears are words that need to be written.” 
― Paulo Coelho

The feeling of sadness I will liken to going through the ebb and flow of the tide. It rises and falls steadily each day. Sometimes I can ride it through, other times it crashes right over me. It seems unexplainable and if allowed all consuming.

Key word being: if.

I continue to fight through the fear, the feelings of sadness, and I turn towards things that bring light into my heart. Sometimes they might seem mundane, but they bring me joy.

Warm laundry.

My cat’s swishing tail on my lap.

The sound of the alarm going off allowing me to rise for another day.

The thought occurred to me to seek comfort in other wise human’s words on this subject. I paused at these quotes and found them to be harkening back to what I was finding troubling alone, when in the midst of my own thoughts today…

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
― Dr. Seuss

“Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“They say when you are missing someone that they are probably feeling the same, but I don’t think it’s possible for you to miss me as much as I’m missing you right now”
― Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Any fool can be happy. It takes a man with real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”
― Clive Barker, Days of Magic, Nights of War

“Tears shed for another person are not a sign of weakness. They are a sign of a pure heart.”
― José N. Harris, MI VIDA: A Story of Faith, Hope and Love

“I don’t know what they are called, the spaces between seconds– but I think of you always in those intervals.”
― Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper

Sometimes I find it difficult to put into words what I am feeling. When I talked to my little classroom students today I said this when they wanted to know what I was absent on our last Friday before winter break, “Someone I was very close to and loved greatly was very sick, and then passed away. It makes me very sad to talk about it, but I can if you want to know more. Please ask me privately, another time, and I’ll answer your questions as best I can. For right now, let’s focus on all the happy things we have the opportunity to do together. :)”

I think she would have liked my explanation.

They all looked at me with such seriousness and we moved forward with the day, as we should, and as she would have done.

I hope that with the words of Ms. Stacy from the tales in which Anne Shirley found challenging, I will look anew at the next day, “Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it.”

❤ Sparkle on friends. ❤