Someone from the church who dropped a meal off for us last night also enclosed a nice handwritten card.  I don’t even know most of the people who drop off the food (neither would Dan) and I don’t recognize these names, but something they wrote really struck me:

“We will never truly comprehend exactly how much we have lost with Dan’s passing, but the world will always be poorer as a result.”

Here I have been thinking in my pain I did comprehend how much I’ve lost, but when I read this I had to rethink it.  No, she is right- I will never comprehend, because that parallel life I see beside me with Dan alive is only in my mind.  I don’t really know what the future would have held.  Would we have had another child?  What would he or she have looked like or accomplished?  Would Dan have started getting more of his own music heard ?  Would he have become a famous film scorer like I always thought he should be?  Would he have encouraged me creatively and would I have produced something truly great?  The variations on all of the “woulds” are endless and there are probably thousands that don’t even cross my mind because I can only work with the materials I have.

No, we will never comprehend it.

How much we have lost.