Hearts Are Breaking

Shattered. Heartbroken. These words appeared in my Twitter, er, X, feed this afternoon. 

Kelsie Snow posted that her husband Chris, who has ALS, suffered cardiac arrest yesterday with a subsequent catastrophic brain injury from lack of oxygen. He is not expected to wake up. 

Kelsie, who describes herself as a writer, podcaster and storyteller, blogs at https://kelsiesnowwrites.com/ and has a podcast called Sorry I'm Sad. She and her husband have two school-age children. He's an executive with an NHL club in Canada and was diagnosed with familial ALS three years ago (that means other people in his family, including his father, have died of the disease). But his progression was slowed significantly in a drug trial. The story of all this, with the accompanying emotional roller coaster, is told in Kelsie's blog which I have followed, as I follow other ALS stories, in the years since my son Kris died of ALS.

It is hard to watch others go through this, even over the distance of social media. I'm not just watching, I'm feeling and remembering. And imagining. There's the loss to Chris's family, Kelsie and their children now living through what they've long feared. There's the loss to others in the ALS community -- families with fathers and mothers and school-age children, people with ALS who are looking for morsels of hope and find them in accounts of a treatment that worked for someone, even in a small way, even for a short time. 

Instead today, a day when an FDA advisory committee is meeting to review the potential benefits of a new therapy, they are having to think about their own death or their loved one's death, even as they grieve for a fellow warrior. I remember Kris telling me, or maybe Michelle told me, how hard it hit him when one of his friends with ALS died. Loss. Over and over again. I'm sitting with that today. 

But I just spent time glancing through Kris's blog. I thought I remembered reading about that friend who died and I wanted to link to that post, but if it indeed was a blog post, I couldn't find it.

But I did get a lively taste of Kris's voice and spirit. A few more tears, yes, and sadness -- so much hard stuff that he and Michelle went through, and the rest of us, too. 

But also love and grace.

Blessed are those who mourn.