My new site is live. Go to guydelcambre.com to take a look. There are a few things that will adjust and be added, but it's a solid start. This site will remain, but will simply be a redirect page within the next few days. Lots of guest posts next week to kick off the first full week of the new site.

So much thanks to Meshali Mitchell for her amazingly creative photography and insights. Check her work out here: meshalimitchellphoto.com
By the way, Meshali Mitchell shot the video below for me recently.

Let me know what you think...

There is much to say about the year or so behind me; both a darkness and a glow to reflect upon.  Grief and grace.  Love and loss.  Redemption and a beautiful new day.  I found myself lost waking each day stumbling in circles, mumbling promises that did not belong to me.  Those days were dark.

 
and in the dark, cold, broken, alone
turn your face to the warming light
a harbor to the refuse of life undone

Happiness killed me, and I did not want to be.  It is the most peculiarly crushing feeling to not fit into your own life all of a sudden.  Comfort on all levels was barely comfortable.  Pictures of a life I once knew, faces of friends that we were connected to, a home that we built together and a day manufactured by our love and God’s hand, all broken and all much more unfamiliar.  That’s precisely how grief entered in my life.  One day life was uninterrupted and strong, full of love and expectation.  The next, terrified and haunted by the death of my wife.  Then a barrage of blurred days, melted together by pain, confusion, insecurity and fear.  I not only lost true love, but faith and God, too.  Prayer seemed worthless and superstitious as a result of unanswered desperate requests made as neatly and broken as I could make them.  And so, I lost my wife and my God.  It must be comparable to waking to a surgeon unexpectedly cutting into your chest to remove only half of your healthy heart.  The continual sensation being conscious and aware while only mostly sedated.  And then being rushed back into your daily routine while the scars only kept breaking open.  The days were long, my strength was short and I was lost with no end in sight.  People kept telling me things would change, that life would get better.  I resented some of them.

Somewhere along the way, slowly, not like a rushing wave cleansing the dirtiness of loss, pain away, but more like a steadily rising tide that begins to carry you and make you feel lighter, that new day arrived.  It will never be a good thing that I lost my wife, but I will never curse the day or dismiss it because the absolute bitterness and the now certainty of sweetness is that some of what I lost needed to be.  And the most beautiful and sacred thing that did not need to be was forever memorialized in the hearts of my daughters.  She would never want me to wallow and sink forever in the ashes of the life we once had together.  It was, but is no more. 

There are many thoughts about grief and how it exists in a person’s life; uninvited and unrelenting, but ultimately good.  If grief could be a measurement of one’s health or location of how close one is to making it out, then acceptance would be the finish line, but that is just as ridiculous as it sounds.  There is no finish line or certificate of completion to grief and loss.  I do not think of acceptance as some submissive posture of being okay with death breaking into my life and taking from me.  That will never be okay.  For me, acceptance as a form of grief and reaction to losing my wife is about recognizing the absolute beauty of what was, as it being special and unique, something all to ourselves, but is no more.  Acceptance is about giving myself permission to let that day lie in the past, stand in the depths of God’s grace and allow my heart to open fully again.  That day has arrived.  I have seen the glow on the horizon while the night was still cold, but now I feel the warmth that that new day brings.  In the most fitting of ways, the new day validates and supports my acceptance of what was.

Thanks for following me here for the past year or so, for traveling with me through such a time as it was and for being a depth of encouragement that you may never fully comprehend.  This will be the last post that I write here at allthingsdelcambre.com. 

My new site will launch later this week.  I will announce it here.  I hope you continue with us as we move on into love and life.

So in the end, I am not finished, but much more complete. 

“We were gonna get married.”

Sitting across from a man abandoned by time and lost in circumstance moving faster than his emotions and any ability to actually absorb all that was happening, I looked into his eyes that were mirrors for just a moment.  It was just me and him sitting there, both aware.  The woman he loved was there, but not completely.  Teetering somewhere between him and death was precisely where she was at, her body being swallowed by death in the form of cancer. 

“It spread faster than we ever imagined.  We love each other.”
“I’m certain you do, sir.  I can tell by the way you hold her hand, gently and protectively.”

He asked for a moment.  He was sinking in the confusing realization that it would not be too long before they were finally separated by her death.  The consolation, her suffering would be over.  That is only the smallest solace that is quickly overrun by the untimely arrival of death.  I left the room as he started to talk to her.

Waiting just outside her hospital room in the hustle of nurses and doctors, therapists and social workers and families walking by with either a look of relief or grief, I thought about death and circumstance and time.  I was a face wandering through the hustling halls of a hospital not long ago.  My look was one of grief.  Circumstance was insurmountable no matter how badly I wanted something different.  Time lost meaning and the days just spun in circles.  And sitting there, right outside of this dying woman’s hospital room where this man was me and I was him once, time found me as I tried to fight back tears for a man and his wife who had no more time together.  Inside of this room, the man knew it, too.  So did she, the one he wanted to marry.

Something he told me just continually replayed in my head.  “She was scheduled to begin a newly released drug that just got approved in two days.  It is supposed to be the best thing for melanoma.”  No matter how effective that drug truly was, it didn’t make a difference.  It couldn’t, and it wouldn’t.  There was no time.

It is true that there is no time like the present.  But those are usually the words of men spooked by fear, bothered by failure and haphazardly walking into what they may or may not quite be ready for.  The glaring truth is that the present is all that we really have.  It is all that truly exists.  And the present time is full despite what the day before or the day impending after, or even the very next moment, may hold.

Now is both a promise and an opportunity.  Tomorrow is neither with absolute certainty and yesterday has come and gone.

With my work badge hanging on my belt, wearing dress clothes typical for me during my work day and while setting up this woman’s end of life care, I realized that for a good part of the last year and a half, I have been swaying between the aftermath of the death of the woman who once so lovingly and incredibly was my wife and the life glimmering and shining with promise just ahead.  Yesterday and tomorrow defining my response to today.  And it’s been killing me.

For the very few absolutely amazing things gracefully existing in my life right now today, there is no time to live with the weight of yesterday or the pressure of tomorrow.  I must allow today to be valued only by the time that it contains.  Otherwise, I’ll worry away people and possibility that I love.

Today is here, and it is happening now.  May it continue to be a miraculous result of God’s unending, persistent grace.  And let it be an announcement echoing within my heart to love those in my life easily and live the day thoroughly in the moments given now.