March 25.
Change is hard. Not changing is sometimes harder. And being held to standards which others (even well-intended) expect of you based on experiences they’ve not experienced themselves is impossible…
One of the first questions I was asked immediately after being released from the hospital threw me for a loop. It was as if I was taking a test and leaving a question blank, and we all know how well that works for a Type-A personality.
So, are you changed? Are you like, stopping to smell the roses and all super close to God now?
What what? I had no idea how to answer if I was “a new person!” Was I supposed to be? Did one of the copious amounts of chemo contain an alter-ego, a better me, a different me? I didn’t feellike someone else. I might have looked like a totally different person on the outside, but my insides were still (mostly) intact. My past was unchanged; my memories and friendships and loves and lessons and hopes and dreams were all still the same. Cancer may have been my worst adversary to date, but no way did it have enough power to unlock my treasure chest containing those precious items.
I hadn’t stopped to think about how I felt. I just wanted to go to the Post Office again. Pick up dry-cleaning. Fall asleep next to a human being I was connected to instead of a beeping machine. I wanted to be normal again.
But is there ever such a thing as normal in life? I mean, really. If you guys know where they sell that let me know, would you? Not that I’d buy it, mind you, but it would be fun to find out what constitutes such a subjective idea that most of us strive to attain.
Here’s what I did learn manyyears later (not in the hospital parking lot): it is exactly in that striving when we miss the things which are right in front of us. The people who are there, the ones who are glaringly not, the chance to be changed.
Cancer takes normalcy out of life in the blink of an eye. But we can still choose to see. We can still choose to believe. Because on the other side of cancer is a new person just waiting to blossom into exactly what (that God I’m much closer to now) wants them to become.
I can’t wait to see what Greyson and Kellcey become when they grow up. Please help us give them and so many others that chance. We all have choices to make, and many of them in this journey are not that easy. This one is.
32 Days.
