Life is unpredictable, and that is the sort of cliche that everyone knows to be true but it doesn’t feel true until the unpredictability of life whacks you in the face as abruptly as stepping on a rake in a cartoon. We got whacked in the face with a rake when my 44-year-old husband had a stroke last October 28.
The day of his stroke, Mike and I were both running. He was found in our neighborhood, very quickly, by a doctor who recognized the signs of stroke and called an ambulance. Other neighbors rallied to find me and I got back to my car with 6ish messages from neighbors who really wanted me to call them.
At the hospital, after some quick diagnosing and imaging, he was wheeled into surgery and a large clot was removed. It’s been a rollercoaster ever since. We are now approaching the 6-month mark from one sort of ‘unimaginable’, made all the harder because it was a stroke out of nowhere, a lightning bolt out of the clear blue sky.
It was also a hard ‘reset’ for our life together. Suddenly, we were together more than we’d ever been. He went from someone who needed constant help to someone who needed ‘minding’, and then to someone who could be mostly trusted, and all of it on my watch. We didn’t have much time for anything beyond each other, our family and all of the rehab appointments. And that was ok. It was a gift of time out of a tragedy. It was a realignment through adversity.
So there was very little time for business. Or photography. Or anything else. Over the past few months, I’ve dipped my toes in here and there by taking some headshots and dancer portraits, but it’s mostly been just thinking about life, about my life and my husband’s and our family, and reimaging ‘the back 40’. I’ve been thinking about how we change day to day, or year to year, through life or illness or joy or tragedy. I have had to meet this time with an open-heartedness and open-mindedness, and if I can do that for this experience, what else can I do it for? What can I rethink?
I’m going to try to do some of that here in this blog, or Instagram or Facebook, or wherever you are seeing this. Writing really helped me during the acute phase of my husband’s recovery, and I hope to keep it up. If that’s interesting to you, cool, cool. If not, also cool. But before you go, think about what can you rethink in your life? I’d love to know.