How am I doing?
I'm not sure.
I am a little bit torn.
I know how I feel. 
I feel sad.
I also know I have a choice as to how I show up to greet each day. 
I can choose to let my sadness dictate how I present myself to the world, or I can suck it up, take a deep cleansing breath, slap a smile on my face and see how that goes.
Look, eventually I will have to make that choice.
I can't and I refuse to bury myself in self pity and sadness.
It's not a good look for me.
When I satrted typing in today's date my first thought was "great, Friday the 13th!".

Giving my self permission to succumb to triskaidekaphobia would be just another excuse for wallowing in misery.
I really am not about that at all.
Still there are those haunting memories that are ever present as I walk about the house and prepare for the day ahead.
There's the basket of monkeys overflowing with Loki's stuffed animals.
There's the credit card that I just put away, the one that I swiped at the vets office (there is a real dollars and cents aspect to this).
Tonight the whole family will gather for Shabbat dinner. The last time we were all together, we were ALL together.
After I say the prayer over the bread tonight, we will be all too aware of the fact that there is one less at our table.
Do I address this or do we do our best to look past the fact that we can now all stretch out our legs with out infringing upon Loki's favorite spot to be,under the dining room table?
Here's my aha moment of the day.
I can be sad and have a smile on my face.
There is a thing called bitter sweet.
Life is bitter sweet.
Tonight as we do every Friday night, after I say hamotzi, the prayer over the bread,before we eat it, I will dip the bread in salt. The tradition is that the bread is sweet,representing kindness. The salt is bitter representing the bitterness of life.
During the High Holiday season we swap out the salt for honey, removing that bitterness. The holiday season ended last night.
Tonight the mundane sets back in , along with it the reality that life is both bitter and sweet.
In researching this I did find that my family practice surrounding this tradition is wrong. The practice is to dip the bread in salt, not sprinkle the bread in salt.
The sages tell us that by sprinkling the bread we would cover the sweetness of life with bitterness.
Life is bittersweet,we take the good with the bad.
By dipping the bread we recognize that the sweetness is what matters.
During the High Holidays, we forgo the dipping in salt and dip our bread in honey.
It is the sweetest time of the year.
The bitterness is put aside.
The Holiday season ends with the onset of Shabbat tonight.
Tonight, I will make that change in our weekly custom.
Tonight I will dip, not sprinkle.
Today I will smile through my sadness.
Shabbat Shalom!