I have wrestled with the idea of writing this post for a while now. I wasnt sure Facebook was really the place for this and we had wanted to keep this about Charlotte’s story. I also wasn’t sure I was ready to say this to so many as it has been hard enough to admit to our selves. But we cannot separate our stories and I am seeing how too easily one can paint a rosy picture of life on Facebook that reveals only a fraction of the true story. I was reading the other day that the original meaning of courage was “To speaks one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.” If C is for Charlotte and C is for courage and our hope has been that thru all of this Charlotte would learn to practice true courage not just heroism (mostly what the word means these days) then she has to know true courage and see examples of it in us. And this means I must tell our whole story not just the pretty looking pieces. Let me preface this by saying Charlotte is doing amazing. She is leading the charge for us in getting back to the business of living. Though we are definitely seeing side affects from this treatment and the trauma, she has come back in ways we wouldn’t have dared to hope for. It is, however, Jonathan and I who are deeply struggling now. This transition and new chapter of our story has been much harder than we expected and it has been hard for us to accept that. We have struggled to understand why we have not been more joyful. We were one of the lucky ones. We were able to return from this battle with our daughter mostly intact. We know how close we came a couple times to that not being part of our story and we know too many whose stories did not lead here. Yet here we are and we find ourselves wrecked and a drift instead of celebrating and joyous. It feels like we have come through this tremendous storm and our ship is thrashed, we are unmoored and we have lost our heading. Jonathan and I are both weary emotionally and physically. We both find ourselves at this point struggling with health problems brought on by the six months of intense stress and little sleep. We have also both been fighting colds and other viruses over the past weeks that have laid us up. Emotionally this has been a time of weeping, some tears of joy as we are so grateful to see life returning but mostly the unwept tears from these past months. We are learning new how to live with this disease and in this new space. The landscape of our lives has changed and we can never go back to what was “normal” life. This means we again find ourselves traveling over uncharted territory with cancer as our companion that has come and taken up residents. We are wrestling with the fear of relapse that comes and wraps it sinewy fingers around you and gnaws away at your days. If you ignore its visit it can steal so much. So we are learning to welcome again this resident in our life and greet fear when it visits, look it in the face and sit down and have a talk with it. We are learning to grieve the parts of our little girl this disease did take, though it didn’t get all of her. And we are trying to practice grace with ourselves as we heal and process this trauma and knit ourselves back together. You, our community, have faithfully walked with us through this journey. And we need you still. We covet your prayers in this time. We ask for your compassion and grace when texts do not get returned, your email inbox doesn’t show a reply from us and invites get turned down. We are grieving, healing and finding our way and some of that is business we must do on our own. We are thankful to close the treatment chapter but our story is far from done and will not be so neatly wrapped up with the age-old ending “They lived happily ever after.” I know this post is more of a blog post than a status update but thank you to those of you who made it to this point. Thank you for sharing our story and letting me practice courage by sharing all our heart.
Posted on: Thu, 17 Oct 2013 03:13:14 +0000
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