My attention has been drawn back to the year 2007 when I was in a hospital emergency room experiencing heart attack symptoms. While there I met an eighty-four old grandmother who confided in me that it didn’t matter if she lived or died at this point in her life. As she poured out her sorrows to me my heart broke even more.

This wonderful woman had lost two adult children…one to cancer and the other in a car accident. If that wasn’t bad enough one of her grandchildren, at eighteen months, had died of meningitis.

I believe we met at that particular time because I needed her strength and courage to lean on. I had had lung cancer surgery two years prior to this heart episode, and my husband, now in the final stages of Alzheimer’s disease, was dying.

How much is too much? Only God knows.