New Beginnings - Phase I

 

New beginnings Phase I

Life is surprising and ever evolving. It can be scary, it can be stressful, it can be sad, it can be happy, it can be a multitude of things you never in your wildest imagination ever dreamed of happening but does.

Look at me and all the surprises life threw my way. I caught them all and doing the best I knew how, tackled each and every hurdle, every surprise. Hopefully with aplomb and grace.

Backtracking – when I was a young 20-year-old, I met the guy I am with now, Tim. I met him before I met my husband. He was 26 years old and ran sound for a band whose bass player lived in the city I was working in, Prattville, AL. They had come into the restaurant I worked in and when I first laid eyes on Tim, I felt like I had been hit by lightning.

We had a short little “thing” that lasted a brief time but left a huge impression on me and every guy I ever had feelings for afterwards. Life happened and we lost touch. I never forgot him, though.

I met the guy who became my husband, and we started out as best friends first for years, then dated a while after which we married and had an awesome 23+ years as husband/wife. Then, life decided to play a cruel trick on us.

I will never forget that day, that call; I was not quite 49 and I looked in the mirror as I was putting my hair in a ponytail and cramming a baseball hat over my head and said out loud, ‘your life is about to change’. My instincts screamed at me that the outcome was not to be pleasant.

Fast forward from the day of that call in May of 2021 to June of 2022 where I lost my best friend in the early hours of the morning on Monday, June 6 to a horrible cruel disease, cancer. It literally ate him alive, having spread from the primary tumor in his esophagus to his entire skeleton; broken ribs, broken spine, broken collar bone, etc., then started eroding away at his soft organs namely his lungs, then his brain.

All of this happened during covid, so for almost all of the journey, we were on our own. Family lived 2.5 hours away and they had their own shit they were dealing with at the same time we were dealing with our own.

Life can get lonely when your support group is unable to help. But, after that day in June of 2022, I resolved to keep my chin up, keep plodding along and find trivial things to in which to relish life and living. Hence, all my goofy posts with memes or photos; sunsets, birds, plants, flowers, trees, pictures I’d taken of me and my silly face at an attempt to show happiness even when I felt so fucking empty and alone that sometimes I lost my shit so badly I would have to sit and wait for it to pass if/when it hit me when I was out driving.

I did not forget my husband, I figured out ways to live without him.

See Phase II coming shortly.