Home Alone

This weekend, my husband went to Fort Worth to visit his daughter. H is in graduate school at TCU to be a chaplain. She was just accepted for an internship at a Children's Hospital in Dallas. After 6 years of higher education, the end is in sight!

If you are surrounded by children (yours or other people's, like my 19 best friends in my first grade class) all day, you know the need for complete and total, uninterrupted silence at times. I think my husband takes it personally when I am so excited about alone and quiet time for a few days each year. I assure him: I'm not taking ANYONE'S calls or visits. I just need time to rest, pray and think.

So, what did I think about?

Do you ever get so busy in life that you make yourself notes about things you need to think about LATER? I do. And one post-it note came from a very short article I read a week ago.

This article was about a Miss World named Mariana Bridi, who contracted an infection. To save her life, her hands and feet were amputated. And then days later, she died. As awful as this entire story was, there was a part that was even more horrifying to me: the infection she had, Pseudomonas, was the same one my husband fought for five years.

It was five years of infectious disease center infusions, home health care, hospital procedures and surgeries, hyperbaric oxygen treatments...procedures not for the faint of heart. And in the end, my husband still lost his leg and hip. But I realized for the first time through this article, how close death must have hovered at times.

But he is still here. And well. And brave.

Tuesday night we were given tickets to see the Broadway Across America musical, "Legally Blond." We went (on a school night: living large!) and it felt like maybe, just maybe, life is going back to normal. A new normal, but normal none the less.

So, I did a lot of processing this weekend. Enjoying being home alone. And being grateful that it is only a temporary 'alone'.

Because we have a lot of living to do ahead of us; a lot of years to make up for. And we are so very grateful for this second chapter.

So, I end with the words from a favorite song, "Longer".
(And you can stop the moaning, adult children o' mine!)

Through the years as the fire starts to mellow,
Burning lines in the book of our lives
Though the binding cracks
And the pages start to yellow,
I'll be in love with you.