While the world is busy reeling over the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, my family mourns the loss of our own icon–my Auntie Carol.

She has been the matriarch of our family for pretty much as long as I can remember. If you needed an answer to just about anything, she was the one who could come up with an answer, whether for her own daughters, for my mother (her sister), or for me.

Almost 20 years ago she had a liver transplant, which saved and (obviously) extended her life. Ironically, it was, in the end, the transplant that took her–yesterday, while she was undergoing surgery to repair an unrelated aortic aneurysm, the blood vessels surrounding the liver, which were weak (I guess from the long-ago transplant), began to tear. The doctors, including the hospital’s transplant team, tried to repair the damaged vessels, but I guess there’s only so many times those can be stitched together.

The world feels smaller to me today, somehow.  While I rejoice with her that she is with our Lord, our family will always feel her loss.