"Don't let the sun go down upon your anger."

During a recent instant message conversation with our mother she told me that she "is still angry with God". While the very idea of our mother's faith quaking, gives me the greatest heartache, I can’t say that I blame her. In the moment I replied with, “and you have every right to be”, and while I am uncertain if this was the correct route to take, it is what I felt in my heart. While I can only hope that “this too shall pass”, it got me to thinking of who I could find to deter her from placing the blame on God. The answer was as heartbreaking as the question, nobody. There isn’t a horrible person to put on trial for your murder, there isn’t someone to press charges on for driving under the influence, your car didn’t have some sudden malfunction that we were unaware of, we couldn’t even blame you for driving with less than perfect inhibitions or without a seatbelt. So who do we blame? Or do we blame anyone at all? Or perhaps we are just left to accept it for exactly what it was a callous, unexpected accident.

I started thinking about the trip we took to Savannah over Labor Day weekend and how we didn’t speak to each other at the whole way back to your dorm. I had wanted to get an early start back to Cleveland but you amazingly had “forgotten” I had ever mentioned that to you. You wanted time to go say bye to your boyfriend at his work before we left and I guess I was making that task more difficult on you. So you pitched a big fit and called me a bunch of nasty, profane names and refused to speak to me the whole way home. What are sisters for? So instead of talking we went to battle with the radio, with you picking one and blasting it, then me picking one and blasting it. By the time we reached your dorm in Kennesaw, we were laughing so hard about how we literally had a three and half hour sing off and not once did we say anything to each other. Good times.

Mom ended her instant message about her resentment towards God with me saying, “I don’t want to be angry with God because I am afraid he won’t let me come to Heaven and then I will never get to see Chelsea again.” I kind of giggled to myself and wrote back to her that if all we had to do was be angry with God to get rejected from Heaven then I had NO chance of getting in and might as well give up now.

I started thinking about one of the books that I took from your room because it was one of our favorites, Little Women. At one point, Jo gets so angry at her younger sister, Amy, for burning her novel during one of her fits. Marmee, in trying to alleviate Jo’s rage says to her, “It is a very great loss and you have every right to be put out but don’t let the sun go down upon your anger, forgive each other and start again tomorrow.” In the last few weeks this has become one of my favorite quotes because it speaks volumes to how one lives life after the loss of a loved one. Day by day we have to learn to live all over again, learn to forgive, learn to let go, and learn to hope.

I can only hope that our mom's anger subsides but if it doesn't maybe she can find a great song to blast instead.