This evening I sit on the beach watching the waves crash against the shore. My Aussie leans her weight against me. Her ears twitch as she eyes the sandpipers dashing through the waves in front of us. The sun slowly sinks behind me as the sky turns a soft pink. This is the “magical hour” coveted by photographers and filmmakers for its soft golden light perfect for photos. With rolling white dunes and golden sea oats bobbing in the breeze, this peaceful scene is straight out of a movie. This evening, I am sitting in the middle of a real life postcard and yet I am thinking about loss.
When I decided to start this blog I thought it would be easy to document the “process of healing”. I imagined at least twice a week I could put pen to paper, or more precisely fingers to keyboard, and describe various uplifting moments wherein I put my life together piece by victorious piece. Now that this project has started, however, I often find my well of inspiration … dry. The victorious bi-weekly documentation of a life made right after tragedy is not as forthcoming as I had hoped. Nope. The truth is healing comes slow. It’s not something that can be scheduled or put on a calendar. You can not tell yourself, “Today I will heal.” Or “by next Tuesday I will take my next step.” That’s just not how healing works. Healing happens when it happens.
Several months after the completion of my treatment the loss still affects me greatly. My life is still unrecognizable. I am still struggling for income. My physical reserve has not recovered. I am still struggling with fatigue and immunocompromise. I still cry often. And things still just don’t quite make sense. I often think about my life BC, before cancer, before COVID. I find it shocking how far my life was knocked off its trajectory by the pandemic and my diagnosis. As I think of this a tear rolls down my cheek. I am alone on the beach so it is ok to cry. I don’t feel comfortable crying when people are around.
This beautiful beach reminds me of my grandfather. I spent many happy sunny days here swimming and building sandcastles with him as a child. My grandfather, when he was alive, made beautiful stained glass. He created spectacular multi-colored seascapes, palm-tree lined desert islands, birds, and animals out of glass. His glass artwork was in high demand and was treasured by family and friends alike. Yet with as many projects as he had, he still found the time to make glass pieces just for me. I have several of his pieces and his glass parrot sits on a perch in my picture window casting red and blue flecks of light across my living room.
I used to imagine my life like a complex piece of stained glass. With each new experience I imagined adding new beautiful pieces of glass to the picture. By my mid-thirties I could see the picture taking shape and I liked what I saw. I was healthy, stable, debt free, financially independent, married, with an amazing support system of friends and family. I traveled the world, I volunteered, and had many hobbies like beekeeping, gardening, and scuba diving. Looking back my life was really amazing (though I did not feel that way at the time). And then COVID happened…and then the cancer happened. One by one these wonderful things were peeled away. It felt like a giant fist had punched through my life. That beautiful stained glass picture I had spent a lifetime curating was then simply a box full of broken pieces.
I imagine healing as sifting through those pieces. Sometimes I think back over the past months much as I would examine a shard of colored glass. I examine what I have gone through. I hold each experience, turn it over in my hand, take care not to cut my fingers on the painful sharp edges, and for the most part return it to the box with everything else that is broken.
Every once in awhile, though, I find a piece and instead of putting it back into the box, I place it into a new frame. It’s a different frame than before, an empty frame, and I have no idea what picture I’m making. My life is so different now I can’t even imagine. Every once in awhile, something new happens and a completely new unbroken piece of glass goes into the frame. Other times after sifting through the box of broken shards, I find use for an old piece of glass in a new orientation. The new pieces don’t fit like a puzzle anymore. No, the pieces don’t even fit together at all yet and I do think it will take months, years, maybe a lifetime for a new picture to take shape.
But what I do know is stained glass is beautiful when the light shines through no matter what the picture and piece by piece, on no set schedule, I will build something new. It won’t look like my old life and the light will shine through differently, but it will still be beautiful and meaningful in a way it never could have been without surviving the tragedy.
