Been a long time away

in a dark valley.
I am somewhat prone to winter depression anyway, and I have had a strange and challenging winter this year.
Our work and slender means of survival are very seasonal, and in darkest winter, there is no work, and no money, and a tense struggle against panic and despair. Every year I know that faith is what I need. And every year, I fail.
This year, it has been especially bad. January seems to have been one long battle against simply staying in bed. Which would of course be cheaper ...
But now the days are perceptibly longer, and although we are forecast an icy blast, I can feel the earth turning, I know that spring cannot be far behind.
But in these dark days are dark things. Yesterday, my brother died. How strange those four words look, in black on white. It cannot be me that is writing them.
Yesterday my brother died.
My brother was clever, and funny, and much loved. He had some issue with me, lost in the ire of our youth, and I had not seen him for thirteen years. I don't know why. When I was a child, I worshipped him. It inevitably made me cry. So eventually, I learned not to love, and therefore not to cry. This link survived for thirty or so years. It was broken by Jesus, and by my husband. But I still only cry alone.

He leaves behind a wife and two daughters: four grandchildren:two sisters: two nieces and three nephews who loved him: and two nieces who never even knew him: sundry great nieces and nephews, and I am sure many others, by marriage, whom I never knew.
He will be terribly missed. He was sixty years old. And I will never know the answer now.
He was not, to anyone's knowledge, a christian. But I never count on knowing these things. I wouldn't put it past him to be making the angels laugh.