Reba Sue

I feel as if I have been punt kicked out of the stadium and far up onto another mountain not of my choosing. The wind is out of me and the tears have flowed like twin creeks to matching rivers somewhere deep within my heart.


Someone very close to me has died unexpectedly.

She was my cousin and older than me by several years, a teenager while I was still a child, but she is one of those people, like her entire family, who matter. She matters to me, just as her sister and brother matter to me to the depths I often don’t, and sometimes can’t, express.

A day would hardly go by without us sharing an e-mail, and two or three weeks would not go by without us talking. She mattered to me because she was my cousin, my family, my blood, but more importantly she was my friend. She matters to me and because I know she isn’t going to be there to talk to and to laugh with and to share things with it hurts so very deeply.

My pain is nothing compared to her husband’s pain and her children’s, or her sister’s and brother’s. I have lost enough people to know I cannot make their pain less in any way, nor can I ease their burden of it; but I can hurt with them because Reba Sue is one of those people who matter to the people around her. That’s just the way God made her.