With the passing of Deanna's father, I was ushered into a new stage of adulthood. Frozen in time, grief comes haltingly. It took two days of busyness and hurry for the mourning to set in.

My tears creating new pools of incandescent passion on his back. The words of my mother upon moving out of our childhood home echoed through my mind. "I saw ghosts of little girls dancing." I wanted to take these specters and hold them tight. My ghost does not belong in that house. All of these changes seem to be crushing me.

"I don't want to grow up." Choked out through tears. "I don't want my parents to get old" and die, lay unspoken in the air, hanging there, mocking my grief. The comforting caress on my cheek would not hold back the tears.

"The privilege of growing older, is drinking deeply of life -- of the sorrow and the joy. God loved us too much to let us live forever in this broken state, that's why He took away the tree," my husband murmurs across the pillow, gently kissing my swollen eyes.

And so I grieve. Not just the passing of a good man, and not just the terrible blow my dear friend has been dealt but I grieve my deepening understanding that a moment in time as we know it exists as a gasp. There and then gone, taking us with it. I grieve, not that we cannot live forever in time --

"If you had never grown older, you never would have met me." Would the ghosts of those little girls care? Now that I have met you, have fallen in love with you, I am shouldered with the exquisite burden of caring.

--but that these changes are out of my control, that while hope and love are forever, something -- like snatches of time -- are not. Is this what eating the fruit was like? The sudden understanding of how dearly important things are to you and the simultaneous reality of how insignificant those things most dear really are. I mourned for those little dancing girls, frozen in time who will live forever. I will not, nor care to return to that place.