11.24 Pain - Give and Take

Bestest Friend and I are in the middle of a blog project. Each day of the month we will post a picture on a pre-determined theme and write a little something about it. The theme for the twenty-fourth day of each month is "Pain."
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I think of my husband's immediate family as large (he has four siblings, they each have spouses and children, his parents and paternal grandparents are still alive), but when you start including his extended family, his family is enormous. While I generally subscribe to "the more the merrier" philosophy of family and we get to go to more than our fair share of celebrations, it also comes with things like this past week.

The older generation, Dr. BB's grandmother, her siblings, and their spouses, range in age from late 80s to their early 90s, and things are not going well for them. His grandmother just got out of the hospital last night in time to attend her sister-in-law's funeral and her other sister-in-law fell over a parking divider and arrived at the church sporting two black eyes and three stitches.

So it's been hard for Dr. BB's family. Yes, their relatives have had long, happy lives and there is a celebratory aspect to that.  But there's pain in knowing that our nieces and nephews will never know this wonderful lady who just died, there's a certain sadness in acknowledging that every time the phone rings, we're expecting the worst, and there's a feeling that we're working on borrowed time.
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To see what Bestest Friend wrote about the theme of the day, check out her blog, Too Legit to Quit.