For Everything There is a Season

"In order to write about life, first you must live it." ~ Ernest Hemingway

Category: courage (Page 3 of 3)

City Of Courage

April 28, 2013 / / 2 Comments
“A hero is an ordinary individual who finds the strength to persevere and endure in spite of overwhelming obstacles. ” ~ Christopher Reeve
 

On April 15, 2013, a terrorist act was committed on the people of Boston, Massachusetts as well as on the United States of America. Two young men, ages nineteen and twenty-six, decided for whatever reason, to bomb the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Three people were killed at the finish line and another person was killed by the suspects several days later. Two hundred and sixty-four people were injured. Lives were lost. Limbs were lost. Families were torn apart.

The day of the bombing, I had just shut off the television to go and do some housework. My fiancé called from work to tell me the news. He told me to turn on the television. I was in the middle of something at the time and was distracted. I thought he didn’t know what he was talking about. How could there be a bomb at the Boston Marathon? Not my Boston. Not our Boston.

Five minutes later I realized that my fiancé knew exactly what he was talking about. The horror was all over the news. Pools of blood on the ground and people running in terror. Fear gripped me as I tried to recall in my mind if any of the runners we knew were running that day. The fear continued as I ran through a list in my head of all the friends and family we knew who lived in Boston and the surrounding area. What if one of them had been killed?

I also had other worries. Two bombs going off in Boston could mean what next? Was the state under attack? Hell, was the country under attack? There were so few details at that point and living under two hours from where this attack was taking place did nothing to calm my fears.

Cell service was down at times in the Boston area. Thank God for Facebook. I was able to find out that all of our loved ones were safe and sound. Prayers thanking God were whispered. For the rest of the day and the days following, I continued to watch the story unfold. A story that is still unfolding today, almost two full weeks later.

Boston is a special place to my fiancé and I. Besides having loved ones in that area, it is my fiancé’s hometown. As a child, I dreamed of living there and any road trip east from my western Massachusetts home to see the Boston Red Sox play or to visit the Boston Science Museum was special. Over the past five years, I have spent more and more time in the city. I used to see a medical specialist there and I frequent a Sjogren’s Syndrome support group on a regular basis. Since Chuck and I have been together, we have spent a lot of time exploring the city. It helps that I have my own personal tour guide who knows how to get to almost anywhere in the city! It has become a special place for us and one that Chuck still calls home.

When the bombing happened, I felt like someone had attacked our home. I didn’t know any of the people killed or injured but yet, it felt personal. I remember the devastation I felt on 9/11 and again during the Newtown, CT tragedy, but this was different for me. This was my home state. Boston may be over an hour and a half away, but those were my people that were hurt and killed. Those were my streets that carry the red stains of blood from this cruel act.

Yesterday Chuck and I went to a scheduled Sjogren’s Syndrome support group meeting at Tufts Medical Center in Boston. The meeting was in the morning and we planned to spend the rest of the sunny day walking around the city, which included paying our respects to those who lost their lives and were injured. We didn’t know for sure if there was a place at or near the finish line site to do this but we wanted to try. Chuck printed up a photo of Boston he had taken years ago and superimposed a quote about strength and adversity over the photograph. Something that may bring a little comfort to anyone who reads it.

There was a makeshift memorial right around the corner from the finish line in Copley Square. It was quite the scene. There were still news trucks lining the street and all of Copley Square had different memorials. There were pairs upon pairs of sneakers hanging by their laces from the fence as a tribute to the runners. Flowers, stuffed animals, and Boston sports caps abound. It was truly a tribute to those fallen and those injured.

As I was walking amongst the displays, it struck me. I was shoulder to shoulder with people. The area was very crowded but yet, it was quiet. I have never been in a crowd of people that was so quiet. Copley Square, Boston and the loudest sound you could hear was just the cars driving by. You could hear the hushed whispers here and there between people. A man telling a woman that it was OK to cry. A father instructing his daughter where to place her beloved stuffed owl that she wanted to leave at the memorial. You could hear the quiet sniffles. You could see the tears falling from underneath the lower rim of people’s sunglasses.

This was a sacred space.

Copley Square, Boston is no longer a place of fear and terror. It is now a place of remembrance, respect, and solidarity.

We then proceeded around the corner to stand on the curb at the worn, painted finish line. I looked across the street to the boarded up store windows that were smashed by the explosion. I looked at the storefront of a shop where injured people made their way into after the explosion. My mind flashed back to the explosion images I had seen on television. As I stood on that curb I couldn’t help but think of how it must have felt to be one of those spectators or one of those runners.

The fear.
The chaos.

Ordinary citizens enjoying what should have been an ordinary day.

Before evil took over.

Before that evil was then obliterated by the tenacity and courage of all the men and women of Boston, Massachusetts.

I said a prayer.

After leaving Copley Square, we decided to head back towards the Boston Public Gardens and Boston Common and include a pit stop for lunch along the way. As we were strolling along the Garden, I was struck by the amount of people out and about. People from the city, and who knows where else, enjoying the warmer weather. Taking swan boat rides. Playing frisbee. Single people, couples, families, and pets just enjoying the gifts that this area of the city provides. Showing their resilience while at the same time making a very strong statement.

They were reclaiming their city. They are not going to live in fear of the evil that descended upon Boston, as well as the United States of America, on April 15, 2013. Life is going to go on and the City of Boston is going to emerge as a stronger people. So thank you Boston. Thank you for showing those of us who do not live within the walls of your city what it truly means to be tough and courageous. Thank you for showing us that in the face of evil, human compassion and love will triumph. Thank you for being “Boston Strong”. Thank you for being heroes.

Photo Courtesy of Chuck Myers: http://myerscreativephotography.zenfolio.com/

Road To Marriage

January 14, 2013 / / 2 Comments
 
“Become the kind of person the kind of person you would like to marry would like to marry.” ~ Douglas Wilson

Four months from this Friday I will be getting married.
A whole wedding and everything.

This is a big deal.

I know marriage should be a big deal in general, but let’s be honest. In our society today, people get married and divorced more often than many people change jobs. My fiance and I have both been married before so now we are going to be included in the second marriage statistic. You know, the one that says half of all second marriages will end in divorce.

We will not be on the wrong side of those statistics. I’m sure everyone in love says that right before they get married again. Truth be told, I was fine with never getting married again. That was before I met a partner who made me experience real love for the first time.

That is a strange thing to say considering I was married once before and engaged to someone else even before that. My first fiance was this great guy I met at work when I was about twenty-three years old. We started out as co-workers and then became friends. We dated for a while, I moved into his house, we talked about marriage, I got cancer, he proposed, and then four months before the wedding, the bomb dropped.

He told me that he had come to realize that he never truly loved me and had only proposed because I had just finished my cancer treatments and he felt like he was obligated to propose. That is was what he was “supposed” to do. He should have said something sooner he told me.

Nice.
Problem was, I still loved him.

So I moved out of the house, sought refuge at my parent’s home because I was such an emotional wreck and spent the following weeks cancelling all the wedding plans that were already in place. To this day, I do not think he was a bad person. Confused and gutless yes. But not bad. After a while, I decided I was too young to pine away for a man who would never love me. I found my own apartment and continued to throw myself into my career, my family, and my friends.

Enter the next love. My ex-husband. I met my ex-husband approximately eight months after the break up with the ex-fiance and I did not date anybody in between. I am here to tell you that is a big mistake. I would have sworn to you up and down that I was not on the rebound and maybe I wasn’t. I was twenty-eight years old and all of my friends were getting married and having babies. Now I absolutely thought that I loved him and that he loved me but now looking back, I wonder if subconsciously, I was more in love with him or the idea of being in love with him and having the life society tells us we are supposed to have. You know, the one with 2.2 kids and a white picket fence. Because there were signs there that maybe he was not the right person for me but I did not pay attention to those red flags. I wanted to spend my life with someone and raise a family. I thought this was the way to be happy. Tough thing to admit.

Approximately a year after we got married (we had dated for two years prior to getting married), my ex-husband changed in a way that resembled Jekyll and Hyde. He decided that he did not want children after all. His mood started to change dramatically at times, he developed flashbacks, and he was subsequently diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) which was a result of severe childhood abuse. Then the heavy drinking started and the only thing more difficult than living with an alcoholic, is living with one that has PTSD.

I tried and I tried as hard as I could to keep my marriage together. Eight long years of trying. I certainly made my share of mistakes during my marriage but none that warranted the way I was treated. I thought that if I loved him enough, he would be able to work through his issues, we would have a family and be happy. Instead, I became an emotionally abused wife. The day that he became violent and I thought he would hit me, I began the journey to becoming his ex-wife.

It was not easy, but I have never looked back.
I was finally free.

Despite the fact that the year prior to separating with my ex-husband I began to get very sick from autoimmune related issues, my life really started to evolve. I took control of my life. After we sold our house, I took one of our dogs, moved into my own apartment and discovered I truly enjoyed living by myself again. No chaos. I spent the following two years figuring out who I was as a person and reshaping my definition of what it meant to be happy and that it did not have to include being married, or even having a partner for that matter. Being happy did not depend on whether I was a mother or not. In that quest to find myself, I truly became happy.

I reconnected with my old friends and I made new ones. I began to write and pursue other interests when I wasn’t dealing with my significant medical issues.. I became involved with my church. I dated quite a bit. I even fell for a guy or two. However after a while, I found dating to be exhausting. As a thirty-nine year old with a severe chronic illness, dealing with the drama associated with dating just became too much. Too many liars, cheaters, and men with severe issues. It wasn’t worth my precious energy. I decided that I was going to be content with living on my own, in a great apartment, with my very cool dog and my wonderful family, friends, and church community surrounding me. I had my head on straight now and I was not going to compromise my happiness, health, or peace of mind for anyone else.

Best laid plans, right?

Then enter Chuck. What is it that they say? That love often happens when you are least expecting or looking for it? If you are interested, you can read our story here: Summer of Friendship…Summer of Love.

I knew within weeks of dating Chuck, that I would spend the rest of my life with him. I didn’t care if that involved marriage. I just wanted to be with him. He had become my best friend and it quickly became apparent to me that I could not imagine spending one day without him in my life. It was a big risk for me and maybe he would say the same thing for himself. The risk of loving again after you have been hurt so deeply in the past is probably one of the biggest acts of courage a person can perform. The difference for me this time though was that I knew I was with the right person. I knew what true love felt like.

The type of true love that makes you want to be an even better person than you already are. The type that supports you and encourages your dreams. The type that makes you want to work through all the very difficult questions and differences between you.The type of love that is ultimately unconditional.

I think I just wrote part of my wedding vows.

I am the woman who said she would never get married again but yet, here I am. Older, wiser, and with eyes wide open. I am the woman who is very glad to be a stronger, confident, and more self aware version of her younger self. One who, when she stands in front of her family and friends committing her life to another on May 18th, will know, with all certainty, that it is possible for marriage to last forever.

Giving Up and Finding Peace

January 14, 2012 / / 9 Comments
“Anything in life that we don’t accept will simply make trouble for us until we make peace with it.” ~ Shakti Gawain

My fiancee and I were watching a movie in bed last night, Not because we were having this big romantic lustful evening, but because our bed was the only place I could get remotely comfortable after a nightmarish week of autoimmune related health issues, including severe pain. After the movie finished, I turned to him and asked him if he ever just felt like giving up. The question came out of my mouth so fast that at that moment, I realized how strongly I felt about wanting to give up. I didn’t mean giving up as in ending my life, but I meant giving up in the sense of not fighting so hard to try and be well. I wanted to give up all the doctor’s appointment, medications, advocating for myself, all of it. Most importantly I wanted to give up trying to maintain this positive attitude of “life is great, I am so grateful” crap.

Because reality is, sometimes it is crap. I have always tried to adopt this attitude of “fake it till you make it” because I honestly do believe that it works. The power of positive thinking is a strong one and thoughts do dictate emotions. If I am feeling down and out, I act like everything is better than it is; not because I am in denial but because positivity perpetuates wellness. The problem is that sometimes it does not give you the opportunity to truly acknowledge that sometimes things just suck. You go along through a chronic health situation and all of a sudden, the wall of illness seems insurmontable; the odds too difficult to beat. I think that as patients, and as human beings, we need to stop and be true to ourselves in acknowledging the reality of a lousy situation.

But maybe it is not about beating the odds and maybe it is about finding new ways to go around and over the wall of illness rather than trying to get through it. It is becoming quite apparent to me that over the past six months or so, the course of my Sjogren’s Syndrome has become more severe. Rather than being stable for a few weeks or months at a time, I am constantly dealing with one issue or symptom exacerbation after another. I cannot do everything I was capable of doing six or nine months ago. My ability to socialize on a regular basis or take any kind of trip has diminished significantly. Even the daily activities, such as housework and errands, that I could do more readily have been impacted.

So where has this left me?

It has left me really ticked off…and frustrated…and discouraged.

As this week has progressed and I have found out that my most recent pain and walking crisis may be due to Sjogren’s related nerve damage, I have come to the realization that I am constantly attempting to go through the wall rather than around it or over it. My motivation in trying to get myself better is to try and physically be the person I was before I got sick so that I can go back to work as a nurse and do all the social and physically active things that I used to be able to do. The problem with this is that I have this illness that does not allow for that. I can sit here banging my head against the wall and say I am going to be strong and determined. I WILL overcome and beat this disease. But all this does is leave me working for something that may be impossible to attain while at the same time losing sight of what I DO have. And I have a lot.

And the worst part of all this is….

I have no peace.

The nerve pain has ravaged my body leaving me sleep deprived, cranky, and overwhelmed recently. The worry and stress over how poorly my body has been functioning and the implications of yet another system involved in my illness has eaten away at me.

I have no peace.

I am so busy trying to be strong and determined in an effort to defeat the Sjogren’s beast that I have let it rob me of my peace. This in turn makes me quesion everything else about myself; my ability to follow through on social commitments, my ability to persist with my Sjogren’s book project, my ability to be the kind of partner that my fiancee deserves.

So instead of trying to go through the wall and get back the body I once had, I think it is time to find a way around the wall and develop ways to effectively cope with the body I have now. Maybe this is what I meant by saying I wanted to give up. I want to stop fighting and resisting. Rather, I want to accept the reality of where I am and the implications of my diagnosis while at the same time, continue to learn and utilize different healing treatments to restore and maintain as much of my functioning as my body will allow. I want to attempt to find ways to cope so that my pain and other symptoms do not dictate where I am mentally or spiritually as a person

And if I can accomplish this maybe, just maybe,

I will have peace.

Photo Courtesy of Chuck Myers

Photo

Courage

August 8, 2010 / / 0 Comments

“Every man has his own courage, and is betrayed because he seeks in himself the courage of other persons.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

The soldier who is fighting for freedom. A fireman who rescues a woman from a burning building. The teenager who fights a long battle with cancer. What do all these people have in common? They have courage.

For some people, courage seems to come naturally. For most of us though, it is a huge feat in facing our deepest fears and insecurities. No matter how it is used, demonstrating courage is very risky. It can end up in us getting injured. We could make a fool of ourselves in the process of being brave. Having the courage to face our fears can result in us being disappointed. Sure none of these situations sound very pleasant, but what is the price we are going to pay for sitting by and not facing that which makes us afraid?

Merriam-Webster defines courage as: the moral or mental strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty. The key words that stick out to me in this definition are “persevere” and “difficulty”. Many times, courage presents itself as people doing extreme things in extreme circumstances. That is not to say that isn’t true because of course it is. However I think that oftentimes we do not appreciate courage in the context of everyday occurrences and the incredible people who perform them.

Take the words “persevere” and “difficulty”. Don’t we all persevere through difficult times on a daily (even hourly) basis? Yes, we do. I have been struck lately by how many of these seemingly unnoticed displays of courage I have seen. You have maybe encountered them as well. It is demonstrated by someone who faces their fear of speaking in front of other people. You can see it in the person who is battling an illness but still gets up and faces each day. The father who accepts the fact that his son is gay. The woman who gets her heart shattered, yet opens it up to love again. The person who verbalizes an unpopular opinion. The man who wakes up every day to battle the demons that accompany his post traumatic stress disorder. These are just some of the unsung heroes in our midsts.

This all may not seem to be the kind of stuff that great novels are written about. However like Mr. Emerson was saying in the above quote, every man has his OWN ability to step forward, face his fears, and conquer them. So…how do you define YOUR courage?

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