I am missing Jane tonight more than usual. There is no good and logical reason for it. In fact, I should be in a very good state of mind.

Friday night’s Relay for Life Kick-off Dinner was an overwhelming success. We raised $4100, registered 25 teams, and completely blew our staff partner’s mind with the size and the energy of it. I read the two poems I wrote for it and reduced some appreciable fraction of the audience to tears. By any measure, the night was a success.

I had little to do with that success. The committee did all the heavy lifting: getting the donations, arranging the food, finding the volunteers to run the buffet line. Even setting up the hall ran like clockwork. I’ve worked on a lot of committees and chaired more than a few, but the people on this committee are in a league of their own.

I continued to make progress on reorganizing the house. The blinds, curtain rods, and curtains are all back in their appointed places, the plants are back in the windows, and the bedroom is getting to the point I should be able to paint it  soon.

I’ve done all the social things, received word from an old friend that she has survived her latest cancer operation and is back on her feet, and RSVPed for a number of events in the next few months. The page for the Walking with Jane Fund for NEC Education and Research at Dana-Farber is nearly ready to launch, as is the website for the NEC Research Center there. Those last two items I have had little to do with–but there should be a certain pleasure in their mere existence.

We’ve done a lot the last several months. But none of it holds off the gnawing loneliness on a night like this.

The work does not resolve the loneliness. It holds it at bay for long stretches of time. But then I look up–and there it is again. I don’t do any of this out of the belief that it will eliminate the grief. I know that is not going to happen.

I do what I do out of the belief that maybe I can help prevent someone else from losing their spouse this way–prevent them from going through the awfulness this is.

I know in the short term there is really no hope of that. People are going to continue to die from this disease. We don’t have the knowledge, we don’t have the resources necessary to get the knowledge–at least not yet. Maybe five years from now–maybe ten years from now–that will not be the case. But right now that is the reality.

But reality can be changed. We just have to work hard enough to make the new reality real.

So tonight I will let the grief wash over me. And tomorrow I will get back up and go back to the work at hand.

It is what I do. It is what we all must do if we want to see change in the world.