Sometimes you just need to fly

My sister-in-law Frances just called. Her precious mama died on Saturday night and she wanted to talk to me. We talked about the funeral plans and how we both loved the litergy in the Episcopal Church. Then we cried. We cried when we talked about how special mama's are and in particular our mamas. We talked about how thankful we were that we were able to spend so much time with our mamas near the end of their lives. We laughed about our grief and how it would be so nice if the grief would announce itself. "Ellen, you will be overwhelmed in 10 minutes by a round of grief, get ready." It doesn't and most times you are blind-sided.

I read this article this weekend and then KimT sent it to me so I knew it was good. Here is the whole article.

http://online.worldmag.com/2009/02/23/is-sorrow-a-sin/

Here is one part that meant lots to me.

“It’s like my wife is calling me from the cockpit,” a friend once explained, “and my instinct is to help her land the plane. But then she gets mad and says I don’t listen. I’m only trying to help solve her problem. It took me a long time to figure out that sometimes she just needs to fly around up there for a while.”
Sometimes when my wife talks to me about a struggle, I’ll ask if she’s looking for help landing the plane or if she needs to fly around. In other words, does she want help fixing a problem or does she want someone to just listen and commiserate? I used to think it solely a male tendency, this instinct for classifying things as problems and then setting about finding solutions to them. But in my wife’s friendships I’m seeing that women are by no means immune to this temptation.

Frances and I just flew the plane.