The tracks are twisted up ahead as I get ready to pull into the station. I need this to slow down so that I can make a determination on how to fix the complexity of the end route. That’s the real problem; I don’t know if I can fix it.
Where does time take me when I’m living life? It takes me to days of care-free living, with an enormous love in my heart that I feel with piercing strength that allows me to smile, to laugh and to enjoy what I have. Damn – now this. Not living to my greatest strength yesterday or today. It gets dark here. It gets lonely and fills with fear. This is not where I intended to go and it really is difficult to know how I got here since living has been good. It has been filled with hope and gratitude and a future that I can live with.
I have so much to say and I am encouraged always to write – a book, even. When your mind is filled with so much chaos, there are hundreds of titles and subjects from which to choose. The most obvious would be centered on “All I have learned about appendix cancer: how to survive when you are the caregiver.” Then there’s “Death Promises – and other lies people say.” Let’s not forget “I’ll always be there and other nonsensical meaningless sentences.” Or, “Living with death in your bedroom – one woman’s journey through appendix cancer and the disease that killed her husband” But my thoughts and feelings are always best served up when my writings would include “How love carried a rare cancer victim home”.
Today being the sole survivor in a two-person relationship is hard. I never realized until this past year just how much people’s arrogance and self-importance affects me. I think it’s because when you’ve been through it all, seen it all, lived it all, you just want to glide along the tracks of life. You want to right the wrongs of the world because there’s no time like the present to hold steadfast in what you believe in. You believe in honesty. You believe in helping others with nothing in return because it comes from your heart, not what you may or may not get out of it. Everyone loves and cares about people differently and I have always cared so deeply about others. To hear my husband, “this is why I love you so much.” You just want to coast for the rest of it because the injury to your heart and soul has been so egregious that one wrong word or words will bring an arsenal of expletives to your mind (and sometimes your mouth) in order to calm your emotions from things you cannot change. I just want to free myself from it and all who exhibit it. I think of my dear husbands words, spoken often which included “honey, we can’t change what other people say and do – all that matters is that we know the truth.” And boy, do I know the truth. I know more than I care to know, about many subjects.
The priest at my daughter’s church recently completed a silent retreat and encouraged others to do it; at least once. There is a large part of me that believes this may be the exact thing my soul needs right now. It may be time to step back from the everyday and focus again on what is important to my soul. I see this as a possibility not in the foreseeable future, but without great delay.
It dawns on me that I am clearly living in the shadow of death and not a place I want to be. Today, I surrender. Tomorrow I will no doubt wake up feeling the way I usually feel – I am a woman blessed.
Those tracks ahead at the station must have been a mirage, because I see safe stoppage ahead. As I started this writing today, I knew how cathartic it would be. Thanking God for my gift of words and thanking Keith, from wherever you are, yes, I feel you.
A Woman Blessed 