Sitting at the feet

This has been a strange and sad week. My cousin's daughter's daughter, who was my grand cousin, my third cousin, a beautiful young woman, just out of high school, just enrolled in midwife school, died. Somehow she overdosed on heroin. Somehow someone got her this poison. (He has since been arrested.) She was on life support for most of the week, and left us forever a day after the life support was removed.
I read this week that our life is our guru, our teacher. All we need to do is sit at its feet and be willing to learn. I'm sitting; I'm willing. My heart is breaking. And I make a mighty effort to surround her mother, her father, her sisters with a love that is fierce enough to protect them from any further mischance and grief.