The Power In Taking One Day At A Time…

This is my last night in Phoenix… Before I am a permanent resident of the state of Arizona. It’s been and incredible journey. And… for the record, I hate the word “journey” right now. The last year has been full of burden.

In November “we” started building the house. It was the next step when the relationship is moving in a way that you don’t want to be with anyone else, anywhere else, anytime else. And so it went.

February.

We all know what happened and we all know that the following 90 days were some of the most burdened on the journey of 2022. Buy the house, don’t buy the house. Can you move…? Can you do it alone? Do you even want to?

I kept going.

One sometimes very painful step at a time.

We waited on framing. We waited on sheetrock.

We waited and waited and waited for cabinets. And they finally came, and it started a whole new cycle of worry and angst. Anxiety, distress, and worry. More heartache.

So much change.

In the midst of all of this, my sister has been diagnosed with breast cancer. She talks a lot about the journey and feeling like a burden. I think that’s something I’ve been struggling with. It’s hard to consider and wrap my head around a cancer treatment plan as a journey. It’s hard for me to wrap my head around anything unpleasant being considered a journey. Kauai is a journey… Maui a journey… NYC a journey. Heartbreak, not so much. Cancer, definitely not.

Keri worries about being a burden. She’s the good sister, the one with the kind heart, the always helper, the one you count on, the one who always cares. Genuinely. Cares. She’s not a burden. But ya know what? Cancer is a burden. It’s a shitty awful scary burden. The way that having no control over what happens next is a burden.

But…

We go on. It’s what we do. It’s the Italian in us. It’s the stubborn in us. It’s the we just don’t know any different in us.

So in between the burden and journey, in between the heartache and treatment plans we look for and hope to find the good days, the happy moments, the little sparkles, the evidence of better things to come, and memories of better times we’ve had and better times we’ll have and knowing we wouldn’t know them and wouldn’t recognize them if not for the burdens and journeys that all happened along the way.