My Journey Continues

It is December, the ending of the year but the beginning of the holidays.  In the past, Christmas has been so magical, exciting and extraordinary.  I never lost my childlike wonder for this time of year, until now.  The sky is crying and creating puddles of cold water all over the ground.  The dampness seeps into my bones and I take two showers a day to stay warm.  Thanksgiving is over, but I have not visited the tree farm or decorated the house.   Every morning I wake, and I remember.  Anguish washes over my mind and into my body. My daughter is at deaths door and I am terrified.  It is a small victory each morning, when I check to make sure there was no bad news overnight that she was sent to the ER or suffering further setback.  As long as she has breath, she is alive.  She has physically deteriorated to something I call existence, not life.  I cannot fathom what she is thinking in her deepest soul.  I look at her ...

Time has flown in this most recent chapter of my life.  Sometimes I feel like a piece of moss in a river, powerlessly swirling and drifting along the current.  Until one day, I snag on a log, and watch helplessly as the rest of the world evolves while I stay immobilized, stuck in one spot. So much of my daily activities mirror each other, and I vary my time by finding joy in friends, family and doing creative things I love.  But for my mother and daughter, health has brought life altering changes in a way that having the mundane things in life seem like a blessing. My mother is losing her mind.  She was diagnosed with early onset Dementia with an eighty percent chance of  morphing into Alzheimer disease.  Two months ago, she was living a nice retirement in her beautiful condo with a view in Issaquah.  She had a healthy pension and money in the bank.  Her days were spent exercising, shopping, creating things and visiting with family and fri...

Lately, I have been working on understanding grief and mourning.  Grief is ever changing, always morphing into something different, but ever present.  After nineteen months, I had naively imagined that I would be moving on with my sadness.  But instead, this invader into my life has learned how to hide and shift, and to continuously grow and survive inside me, no matter how I try to evict it. Instead of being a constant companion, always present in a conscious level, it hides in my subconscious, then strikes at any given moment.  It could be a thought, a vision, a memory, or a longing.  In a moment, I am blinking back tears, silently dripping rivulets down my cheeks or openly keening.  Grief has so many forms, it cannot be killed.  Its not just about losing someone, it encompasses unrealized dreams, forced life changes, refining friends, losing family and fear for the future.  I ask myself "Why can't I be happy?" but all I hear is silence....

Grief has a way of rebooting life.  In my case, it set my love life back thirteen years and that's been very hard for me to accept.  Fifteen years ago I was lost after my divorce.  I wanted to find the love of my life and had no idea how to go about it.  I hardly dated in my early years ,since I went from my first boyfriend at sixteen, to marriage by nineteen.  In my late thirties, I was alone for the first time since my teens.  I tried online dating services and after much angst and many one time dates, I met Dean three years later.  Dating to me was like a job and I hated it because it was so much work and very exhausting.  When Dean and I finally fell in love and merged seamlessly together, my life was heaven.  Not once during our entire relationship did I ever miss being single.  We both knew how lucky we were, and secretly reveled in our love knowing others did not have what we had found.  We did not take it for granted. G...

I have a good reason for being absent from blogging for a couple of weeks.  I traveled to Albuquerque, New Mexico on vacation with my best friend, Brenda.  After Dean passed away and upon my daughters diagnosis, I realized how fleeting life could be so I decided to compile a bucket list of items that I wanted to accomplish before I got kicked to the curb myself, so to speak. One of those adventures was to ride in a hot air balloon.  Probably not a big deal most of you say, but as I have aged, I slowly developed a fear of heights.  Its one of those phobias that appears out of no where for some reason and I deal with it as best I can.  My acrophobia bothers me most when I hike up a mountain, stand on a ladder or just trying to enjoy the view at the top of a high building, such as the space needle or empire state building. Needless to say, I was terrified the morning we were to float up into the New Mexico sky and in the first picture above you can see ...

I had bad news yesterday.  A man that worked for my company, Cedar Creek Contractors, died Friday night.  On September 30th, 2017 he was killed in a tragic motorcycle accident.  His name was Tom and he was only thirty five years old.  His motorcycle hit a guardrail and he was thrown over the handlebars and into the oncoming traffic.  Several cars were unable to avoid hitting him. I wonder what his last thoughts were?  Was he scared, numb or unconscious?  Did he see his life flash before his eyes?  I pray that he felt no pain. Coincidentally, it was exactly one year and six months from the day and approximate time Dean passed away.  It was a reminder to once again, live every day and moment as a gift from God.  I am still in disbelief and shock.  I just saw Tom Thursday night for a meeting with one of our clients, a large Property Management firm. He was going to help us with a substantial project we are supposed to start this ...

Today I want to express how grateful I am for so many things.  Its been hard to be positive in the sea of Cancer, Alzheimer (my mom recently diagnosed with) and grief.  Life continues like a speeding freight train when I feel like I'm standing stock still, watching it all go by in a blur. I truly believe that we have some intuition of why we are here on Earth and what our purpose is, even though we all get lost sometimes.  Everyone alive experiences life and is connected to each other in some way, but we are at different stages of our individual journeys.  Deans intuition to always take care of me, eased my transition into life without him. My husband and I did not have much when we met back in 2003.  We each had a small nest egg that we combined together in which we used to build our beautiful home.  As time went on, together we worked hard and created a nice comfortable life.  As cancer destroyed our savings for his healthcare, I didn't worry,...