Hope

As my life travels the winding road in and out of what I call, the world of sick, I learn more about human nature and my instinct to cope.  Losing so much of my family nucleus in the last eighteen months has taught me about my ability to hope, persevere and remain positive against all odds.

In the past, before I had been forced to go down the highway of loss, I would read positive affirmations and stories of adversity in books, or one paragraph life lessons while bored and scanning Facebook, the words not quite meaningless, but forgettable after a minute.  Eventually, we all will face some sort of loss.  I made it too the ripe age of fifty two before all hell broke loose.  Now its seems the universe is making up for lost time.  As I encounter new challenges every day, I realize that we all experience the same things, just at different times.  I guess that's what connects the human race.  Our individuality shows in how we react to these new events. Even though we are the same, we are so very different.

Just as I find myself sinking into the depths of despair, and feel as if I don't want to continue this life of mine, circumstances change, and I continue to take one day at a time and things get better.  Hope never leaves my mind or somewhere deep inside, (maybe my soul), when someone I love is terminally ill.  As sick as Dean was, I could never imagine him dead, until he died.  Even when the doctors repeatedly told me he wasn't going to make it, I did not believe them.  Now facing my daughters cancer, I sometimes feel that I have been sucker punched by God.  My husbands death, my mothers dementia and my fathers death, and now my daughters Melanoma, all within one year.  But my hope for Tia, it never ends, even when her physical decline has brought me to my knees.

When the days become particularly hard to get out of bed in the morning, I see the little faces of my grandchildren and force my feet onto the floor.  They need you, I tell myself. Get up! Keep Moving!

So many comments of, "I don't know how you are doing it?"  or "You're amazing!" roll off me like the breeze.  I don't feel amazing, and I have no choice to do it because this is my life and it's either live it or die.  So, instinctively, I navigate the grief of losing my husband and dad, and hold tight to the hope for my daughter and mother's recovery.  I continue to hope for life to stabilize, for love to find me again and for things to get better.  And mostly, I hope for all the suffering to end and that life for my family continues a while longer.  Until it doesn't.