Eight Months

It's been eight months since Joshua Paul Herrick lost his life to osteosarcoma (bone cancer). He battled it for four years. He barely reached eighteen. This time last year, Josh was told by doctors that he should start organising his things, and that he probably wouldn't be here halfway through next year.

I still don't really understand it. I don't understand why he had to die and why I got to live. I don't understand why a teenager, a kid, was taken from us when there are people who rape and murder and steal and yet nothing bad ever happens to them.

For a really long time I searched for a reason behind his death. Then my nan said something that made me realise a lot of things. She told me that while the Devil made Josh sick, it was God who made him an angel.

After that I found peace with myself, with everyone. I don't know everything. I don't know a lot of things, I can't control everything and I certainly can't explain everything. Thinking you know everything is, to be honest, kind of stupid. Think about the world, how big it is, how much our creator put into it. Consider all the millenia of history. Consider God and His handiwork. There is no possible way to know everything.

"Consider God's handiwork; who can straighten what He hath made crooked?" - Ecclesiastes 7:13.

I can't believe that God gave Josh cancer. We're His children and He loves us even when we're unable to love ourselves or each other. He shows us the way, lights up our world even when all hope seems lost and shows us that His power and His love is greater than any man, woman or child on this planet.

Everything we are and everything we will be is defined by this very moment in which we live and breathe and hope, and each moment is given to us by the grace of God. Each moment we spend laughing in the sun is because He wished it that way. God wants us to be happy, I think.

So even though this Christmas I had one less gift to buy for my friends... I know Josh is there, and waiting for me. I know that one day I'll see him again, even if it's only fleetingly, as if in the rear view mirror. It's alright to mourn. I mourned for Josh long before he died because I knew it was coming but at that point in time, God hadn't yet entered my life.

Or maybe I just never realised he was there.

So I've decided. I'm going to love life. I'm not going to say that it'll be easy, or that I'll always be happy, because we all have rough days and God knows that. But I'm going to try. So, in the words of our idol, Miss Gloria Gaynor, I will survive!

-a solitary blue.