A most beautiful reason...

I sat in another hospital waiting room this week.
For the most beautiful reason.
Mrs. Shannon,  my brave and strong little sister, gave birth to her daughter.
Bethany Joy was in such a rush to begin the adventure that is living these days that she made her appearance in the moment Aunty Suz went for a coffee. Me and my caffeine vice.. (And can I just add that I was under the impression that we had hours of waiting stretched before us when I popped out for said coffee break?? Good one Bethy!) 

She was in a mad rush to be here.
She was wide eyed and perfect.
I fell instantly in love and I'm so thankful for the way my family operates- we belong to each other. My siblings love my boys like they belong to them. I love my nieces and nephew the same way. We belong to each other.

The birth-day of princess Bethany Joy was a reprieve and a reminder.
It was the ebb and flow of the days we are walking.
She is a sliver of heaven, suddenly at home with us.
A reminder of life and how beautiful it is.
A reprieve for her Aunty Suz. Just to sit in that moment and stare into brand new eyes.
What a joy she is.

As I was lost in the wonder of Bethany Joy,  my phone rang. Sheldon was still up north.  He had been picking up a trailer and visiting with his brother before he flew down to meet the newest addition. He had been on his way home from the farm when an accident happened in front of him.  He was right there. One of the first on the scene.
I heard everything I needed to know about how tragic the outcome of this horrific accident was in his voice.
Right there.
I was holding the 6pd 11oz precious reprieve, the perfect reminder of living and I heard it.
The painful, edging it's way back in.
My heart instantly and easily leaned back towards the heaviness it had tried to forget.
That frailty and fragility of life.
A young man. Gone.
Sheldon didn't know him. But on that cool June evening he fought for him. He fought with the same tenacity that he fights his own battle to live some more minutes and days.
He gathered a collection of strangers who had stopped at the site and they fought for that young man.

The ache that Sheldon felt in his arms and legs the next day stood testimony to the minutes and minutes that he tried to help him breath, this young stranger who died an untimely death.

Our hearts go out to the family and the friends of this young man.

A magnificent tension.
The truly beautiful.
The tragically horrendous.
Marching together.

I held my phone to my ear with one hand, Bethy was held close with the other. I listened to Sheldon talk about the accident and the moments after.

"Just get on a plane. Come and cuddle Bethany. She is everything perfect and beautiful." 

Try to push back the bad. 
Look for the reprieve from the sad.
Look for a reminder of the beautiful.

Sometimes I feel like I have a set of scales in front of me all day, everyday. And I shuffle our moments. Weighing the bad news,  the set backs, the prognosis of terminal..
And as the sad side dips down, piled high with these tough days,  I scramble to find the good. To find the laughs and the hope. To add to that other side.. To try to make the scales of our moments sway between the sad, the tough and the lovely, the beautiful.

That's the magnificent tension. The scales of our moments, weighed with the weight of cancer and all of its horrendous crap.. Balanced with the birth of a little slice of perfection. Balanced with our boys and the gift that they are. Balanced with the years we have had.. The life we have built.

Weighing the moments.

Sad.

Happy.

Terrible.

Beautiful.

It's the magnificent tension. I've talked about it before (previous blog titled 'The Magnificent tension') because it's the only way I can give words to express what we are walking and living.

The unthinkably sad, arm in arm with perfection. 

So...

I have a stunning new niece.

I FaceTime her mother and only want to see the newborn sleeping.

I demand photos of each outfit, each moment.

Perfection. 

And then...

We count our days. (He's sore.. His liver hurts tonight. He has a really bad cough. We count...)

We weigh our moments. 

Sometimes the scale tips towards the beautiful...sometimes towards the tragic. 

Still.. We go on. 

We just go on. 

Suz vs. the Wall

For a long time I've heard from well meaning people that I'm heading for a wall.
Just the other day my chiropractor said it..
"Your body is in trauma survival mode... the line between simple stress and full blown trauma has been crossed and your body is hurtling towards a wall."
A kind therapist explained it recently when I sat down with him to talk about strategies to help my sons deal with... well, with the idea of losing their dad. Suffice to say that the session quickly turned into a "emergency help for Suz". I hadn't really spoken much about what is going on in our world. I've had the odd chat but prefer to write these little notes about "feelings" and what not.. It's nice to write something, post it and feel a certain detachment.

 I do that a lot... Detach. Here's what that sounds like: (inner monologue) the Gakowski family..oh wow... That poor family. Such a crap time. How awesome that everyone is being so kind. Great friends who have their back.. Must be tough to face that news though... Look at those boys.. So brave. So funny. This must be so hard for them to fathom.. And look at him. He looks really well. You'd never believe it unless you knew them, hey....

Detach.

Compartmentalise.

Apparently these are really good tools in my resilience tool kit. For a while at least... 

And when the inner monologuing, detatching, compartmentalising  chick gets slapped down by reality Suz... Well, then that "wall of catastrophe" pops up. 

Sometimes reality Suz jumps over the wall and gets a bit of a graze on the ol' shins.. She smashes that wall of catastrophe and keeps powering. She is positivity personified as she sail over the wall. 

And sometimes she face plants.

Belly flops.

Is entirely shattered.

The catastrophic wall looms in countless storeys and reality Suz tries to claw her way up and over it. 

The therapist calls this 'catastrophising'. Allowing your imagination and thought processes to go there. Go to the worst case scenario and linger there for a moment. Stand in front of that wall of catastrophe. And once there, start to work a plan. See the tradgedy. Listen for the sadness. And then work a plan. 

I've always said that I refuse to allow myself to go there.. To think about what might be coming. I refuse to grieve now for what hasn't taken place. That's just a pipe dream though.. Because anyone who comes face to face with the fragile nature of living must fully come face to face with what that fragility truly means. Stand there and look it in the eyes. This thing of grieving is to stand and stare at this wall.

The challenge is to face that wall of catastrophe and not be owned by it.

To maybe face plant or belly flop and stand up, brush off the bits of grainy, gritty wall that cling to you. To not be consumed by the catastrophic.

I hit the wall recently. 

And when I say hit.. I actually want you to imagine me hurtling towards a 50 gazillion, 34million and 23 hundred storey wall that is made up of ugly brown rocks. Each rock is designed to inflict that feeling of catastrophe.

And when I hit it, everything hurt.

My positivity vanished.

My body pained. 

I was so sad.. And weary. 

At one point I was lying face down on our bed. I couldn't move. Sheldon came in and curled up next to me and asked me what he could do to help. 

Well... "Don't die and leave me alone" came to mind.

"I want my mum.." That followed a close second.

I said nothing. Not because I was being kind by not putting my unfair request on him, but because I couldn't find the strength to talk. 

Inner monologue chick made her timely appearance at this point of my weary paralysis. 

"Look at her.. So much for all that peace, faith, grace and hope she preaches about. She can't even answer a simple question." 

And from the place of weary paralysis at the foot of the wall of catastrophe, reality Suz made her slow and not-quite-heroic comeback. She slapped down inner monologue chick. She could because she found something at the bottom of the wall.

 She found that it's not a sign of faithlessness to be sad. 

She discovered that being tired is ok.. It means you need to take some time to become un-tired.

I realised that the grace I've been talking about looks like this: it looks like me.. Lying in paralysed weariness and such deep profound sadness and being ok. 

Being ok. 

Being ok to be sad.

Being ok to be tired.

Being ok to hate cancer and hospitals and chemo drugs and palliative care and funerals- the ones that I've lived through and the ones I will survive.

Being ok.

And then, when I realise that I'm ok.... that here..HERE... was that grace to be able to breath through this pain, I got up. 

And I had a cup of tea.

And I hugged my boys.

And I had a good cry.

And I breathed.

Here's that grace that I found in the shadow of the wall.

I have this really beautiful friend.

We've known each other for 17 years. 

She is phenomenal in her ability to listen when I can't find any words and hear all the things I'm trying to say.

She's also a gun preacher.

I heard all of 15 seconds of a preach she gave last week. (Oh insta.. How I love thee..)

She talked about something really profound to do with how hope is daring and plain downright crazy. And how the problem is we want the eagle of hope to swoop in to that shadowed catastrophe place and carry us away. The helicopter of hope. 

But hope is rarely about changing the externals of the situations.

I was still lying prostate in a state of paralysed weariness when hope found me. 

When I hit the wall and my emotional, physical, mental and spiritual wellbeing was hanging by a tenuous thread, it wasn't the eagle of hope that took the shadow of the wall away. The catastrophic still remains. The pain lingers and we are faced with the unknown..literally. We don't know what's going on or what to do. 

But, just as grace was found in the shadowed place, that's where hope shines. Because hope is an anchor.

An anchor that steadies in the storm.

An anchor that is steadfast in the changing.

An anchor that holds tight in the shadow of the wall of catastrophe and reels me towards a lighter place. 

So. 

I hit the wall.

And I suffered through the shadows. Until I found the grace to get up and I knew the steadfast anchor of hope.

And I'm ok with that.