“You need to start a blog!” a friend told me the other day, when I posted a long Facebook update about Easter and bitterness.
Oh. I already have a blog. Right.
I’d forgotten.
It’s been over a year since I’ve posted anything, and I’m not sure why, because the words in my head haven’t really stopped. Maybe it’s because just a month or so after my last post, Mark’s mom was diagnosed with cancer. Multiple myeloma. I’ll never forget sitting in that hospital room, watching her face crumple as the doctor talked, tears spilling from her eyes. She pulled the covers over her head at one point and I wished I had some too, because news like that disconnects your heart and makes it free-fall somewhere down toward your knees and you just want to hide for a minute.
Turns out, you can’t hide from cancer.
I wrote still, after that, but on a Caringbridge site instead of a blog. I wrote in my language of lab values and symptoms and definitive needs and requests for prayer and fumed as silently as I could over talk of miracles. I wrestled with faith and doubt, just like always, and fretted and worried over white counts and platelet counts and how you get a grown woman to take meds she doesn’t want to take and eat food she doesn’t want to eat.
And a year after diagnosis, she’s in remission, has been since November. There are still things I probably haven’t processed. I’m sure there are things she hasn’t processed, that Mark’s dad hasn’t either. But she is well, for now, and we are so grateful for it, pressing forward with bated breath, hoping that the transplant holds out until a cure is found.
So maybe I’ve been away because of that, or because sometimes work offers tragedy so intense that I don’t have words to post, or because life just gets so busy that I’m too involved with living it to write about it.
Whatever the reason, I’m here again. Hopefully I’ll continue to find meaningful things to share, words to write. Hopefully there can be dialogue somewhere along the way. Hopefully I won’t get lost again, in the hubbub of a crazy world where crazy things happen all the time, both good and bad.
Hopefully you’ll join me on this journey of words and life and love.
the thing with feathers 