Sand castles

I am actually doing pretty well right now.  The awful pain from after my brother was arrested has changed to just an ache and sorrow, knowing that at some point the next step (being arrested and charged with whatever he is really charged with) will come and bring new waves of pain, but for right now it is the same as it was 2 months ago when this started and I can live with it.  Trying to make myself see him as a human instead of a monster has been really helpful.  What he is accused of remains monsterous but he is still a human.  I think it is likely that this will be what is hardest to cope with throughout the entire process.  Other things are stressful, like surgery (gulp), but I'm doing fine and actually have been sleeping many hours per day.  I don't think it is depression, I think it is my body recovering.  I'm even off of the valium.

At the beach last week my older niece built a sand castle.  Unfortunately high tide began to come in and threatened her masterpiece.  For a while it was held by a moat her father dug around it but eventually it began to crumble.  And so I watched that little girl run and grab handfuls of sand, one after another and throw them on her castle, working as hard as she could to patch it up and keep it together.  She actually was quite successful and the castle held up to the tide for quite a while. 

Watching her I realized that what she was doing was pretty much just showing us what we have to do in life.  It gets hard to hold it together and all we can do is throw on patches to keep it together the best we can.  That's certainly been the theme of the last 2 months.  I have lived through some very bad times in my life and I've been hurt badly by them.  The events of the last 2 months though have shaken me greatly because someone who I trusted, something that takes so much to earn, did one of the worst possible things that can be done in my experience/view of life.  And so instead of living most of that time has been spent simply throwing sand at the castle and hoping it would stick.

I think my castle mostly broke apart and washed away in the last 8 weeks. But just like my niece's sandcastle just enough remained that life is still recognizable despite being terribly battered.  It will never be the same.  It's going to be hit by another tide eventually.  But something survived and for a while I really did not think that was going to happen.