A thank you letter to the novel Coronavirus

Dear COVID-19,

I have spent the last week of my life wrestling with thoughts of both panic and calm, both fight and flight, and both rest and unrest. I have struggled to make sense of the devastation you have brought into our world. I have cried tears of sadness over lives lost, over tragedy I’ve never known. And after a friend confided “I don’t think things will ever go back to the way they were before”, I cried oceans worth of tears in fear over the potential implications for our future.

This one sentence penetrated my thoughts and for nearly 2 whole days, it was all I could think about. It overcame every single positive thought I could seem to muster up. In the silence of social distancing, all I could hear was the deafening sound of my worst fears - fears that a life I took for granted may never be possible again.

I have seen and heard some truly terrible things this week. But, determined to not go completely crazy, I sought intentionally each and every day to see beautiful things this week, too. I have hunted and searched and peeked behind every single corner, looked on every dusty shelf, and asked every wise soul I know.

And that is how I came to realize that while my fears are real and valid, I also needed to acknowledge the ways in which I am grateful to you.

Because somehow, tonight, I find myself crying tears of thanksgiving, too.

Thank you for the ways in which you have taught us to appreciate each other and the ways in which we each uniquely serve our community.

From the frontline workers like doctors & nurses to the teachers, the grocery store workers, and sanitation employees - thank you for, in your own crazy crisis way, glorifying and recognizing each of these people as they so deserve to be recognized.

Thank you for forcing us to, for once, look at every single piece of the puzzle as if it were the most valuable.

Thank you for stripping away every single convenience and privilege that I had so that I had no choice but to understand the greatness and vastness of the blessings in my life.

Thank you for reminding me that fresh air and sunshine are a privilege and a gift.

Thank you for somehow giving the necessary push to read books that have sat on the shelf far too long.

Thank you for reminding me that the kind of comfort and rest I find when spending time in God’s word can not be found nor mirrored in things like parties and gatherings.

Thank you for showing me that, despite our differences and our human faults, my community really, truly cares about each other.

Thank you for forcing us to look outside of our own comfort zone to find tangible ways to truly love on our neighbors.

Thank you for teaching me, for the first time in my life, of the importance of the very basics of human connections like handshakes and hugs.

Thank you for knocking me over in such a powerful way that I had no choice but to find myself on my knees, crying out to a God I somedays can’t find myself to trust.

Please, please, leave soon, in as quick of a flurry as you came. Please spare the lives of our community and our world. But please, don’t leave “normal” in your wake as you go.

I have never in my lifetime witnessed anything like the mass devastation and torture that you, coronavirus, have brought upon us. And frankly, I hope I never will again.

Xoxo, Love You

Grief is so complicated, so messy, so intricately intertwined in daily life that it it sometimes sneaks up on you and catches you off guard. 

Like today - driving to work on a plain ole normal Thursday morning. A brief thought of Valentine’s Day was all it took to make me think of you. I glanced down at your handwriting on my wrist and smiled - and quickly melted into a puddle of tears that were hard to overcome.

I thought after 11 years, it would get easier, less emotional, but I think it’s the opposite - now I just desperately grasp at any reminder or memory of the time we did get. Every year seems to carry more weight and more complicated emotions than the one before. 

I can picture it all - the exact place I was in when I got the phone call, the drive up to Osborn that evening to see you, and the sleepless night that followed.

I’ve really never *not* thought of you. I still wear your red t-shirt to bed more nights than not. It’s been 11 years but sometimes I swear I can still feel you here. A lot of things remind me of you - like drinking coffee, seeing ride-on lawn mowers, and anything Swedish. I have your signature embedded in my skin and your memory implanted in my brain - but my soul still longs for more.

You loved Jesus and you loved His people so intentionally and SO well. I have an entire box of cards from you - from Halloween to Easter and everything in between, you never passed up on an opportunity to send well wishes & love (and probably a 5 dollar bill!), even when we couldn’t be together.

So it was fitting, then, that after you died on February 13, we found a signed and sealed Valentine’s Day card all ready to go  on your kitchen counter - one last reminder of how thoughtful you were and how much you loved - well, love. 

It is impossible to fathom that someday I will realize I’ve lived as many years without you as the 16 we spent together. It’s hard not to be bitter that I lost you so young. I thought I was grown up at the time but gosh, how much of life I’ve lived wishing I could pick up the phone and call you or sit on your lap and hear you say “what’s up little squirt?!” one more time.

I wonder what you’d think of this adult life I’ve made for myself. Your friends all told me you were so excited to watch me graduate high school & spent a lot of time talking about staying in Arizona to be there for the occasion. I know you were proud of me then, I can’t imagine what you’d say now, if I could tell you everything. Like the fact that I now work in an emergency room just down the street from the one where you spent your last day. It warms my heart to wonder if some of my now coworkers were there that day with you in the trauma bay - I like to think that they were.

I want to hate Valentine’s Day for opening my scars every year, but I’m trying to be thankful for any reason to feel closer to you. Happy Valentine’s Day, Morfar. 

Xoxo,

Love you ❤️

On Songs & Seasons

For all of my adult life, seasons have been marked in current time & in memories with songs. Some people remember the foods they ate, the people they were with, but I always remember the songs I was listening to. The ones I blasted in the car on rough days when I felt like I had nothing left to cling to and the ones I blasted just as loud when I needed to be pumped up for a good day. I can hear a song randomly on the radio, or in the store, and I’ll have an instant flashback to a specific street I was driving on & the struggles I was facing at the time. This will come as no surprise to those who know I have song lyrics tattooed on my body, of the one song that carried me through MULTIPLE seasons and continues to do so.

So I guess it’s not surprising that halfway through 2020 & with another birthday having just passed, it’s become clear what that song is for me, right now. And I’ve decided to share my thoughts on it, since so many of us, maybe for the first time, are living this same season together.

For the last year of my life (almost literally, 358 days and counting) I’ve battled my worst uphill medical battle so far - a spontaneous CSF leak (though it wasn’t diagnosed until 4 months later). July 15,2019 is distinctly marked in my head as the last day I was truly pain free. I never in a million years thought I would pray to *only* have all of my OTHER medical problems, but that’s been the prayer for a year now. Please, God, just make this stop. Give me an answer. A cure. A miracle. Even ONE completely pain free day. Please. Anything.

Then: 2020 started. Fresh start? Nah, more like fires. COVID-19. Murder hornets. New words like “Social distancing” and “Quarantine”. In addition to all the implications this had on all of us, I also had to find a new way to navigate the ever-changing healthcare system and put many appointments and procedures on hold. Indefinitely. 

On more occasion than one, I’ve felt like I’m in over my head. I’ve felt like I’m facing the ocean head on, trying to dodge incoming waves and learn a new normal, learn a different way to swim, only to find myself struggling to keep my head above the water at the end of each day.

If 2020 has made one thing abundantly clear to me, it’s that the struggles are not going to end anytime soon. The waters are not going to stop rising. The tide is not going to stop threatening to overtake me. The waves are not going to stop smacking me in the face and tossing me around, leaving me breathless and bruised. I want to believe that I could wake up tomorrow miraculously healed, with no need for further medical intervention, and while it may be possible, it’s certainly not a realistic plan. I want to believe that covid will be gone soon and that hugging my friends freely will be a reality again - but it’s not looking so good.

I don’t know yet if this song will be the one I remember 5 years from now when I think of 2020. I don’t know if I’ll find a new significant song next month or if this one will be stuck on repeat for years. Either way, I’m thankful for it today.

As the song goes:

“I’m reaching out,

I’ll chase you down,

I dare you to believe how much I love you now!

Don’t be afraid,

I am your strength,

We’ll be walking on the water

Dancing on the waves”

So maybe, in this season, instead of praying for no more waves, praying for the end of suffering for me & for so many others, maybe it’s time to pray that I can start learning to dance on those waves - the same ones that have threatened to overtake me & drown me. Less drowning, more dancing. Let the dance lessons begin.

2020 - the year of (un)happy birthday parties

True story: I’ve had a secret Pinterest board going for a few years, dreaming of and planning for the most epic & instagram worthy golden birthday party you imagine. If it’s cheesy and over the top and SPARKLY, it’s probably on the board. Then, at the beginning of 2020 I realized my birthday would FINALLY fall over a weekend and I.was.STOKED!!!!!!!

(Yes, I know I’m extra. Guac is extra too and everyone still loves it so...anyways, moving on!)

Before you completely judge me, you should know that I’ve  had a weird obsession with golden birthdays for as long as I can remember. It all started when my elementary school bestie got to celebrate hers early on in life. I remember thinking it was SO COOL. But then I did the math and calculated that I wouldn’t celebrate my golden until I was 27 - in the year 2020. I remember that it sounded unfathombly far away and that, as such a young child, 2020 sounded like a fictional year in a different dimension.

And well, 2020 is here. 27 is here. And to be honest? It kind of feels like a fictional year in a different dimension... 

Technically our stay at home order has long expired, but with our county & state being the #1 covid hotspot & cases rising each day, it became clear that a birthday celebration of any kind at all was not going to be feasible, much less ethical in any way. Small sacrifice for what I hope will be a worthwhile impact.

The truth is that 2020 has changed a whole lot of things. It has changed birthday parties, sure, but what weighs heaviest on my heart are things less obvious to the outside viewer. It’s been a year of such constant heartbreak, frustration, and unrest has made celebrating anything feel more weird and inappropriate than natural and normal.

I remember back in March that I said to my roommate “I feel so bad for everyone having birthdays right now. It must mentally be so hard to get in the mind frame of celebrating a “happy birthday” when so much is unknown, when so much is overwhelming, when so many are hurting…”

2020 has brought physical changes, with “social distancing” and quarantine, with “distance learning” and celebratory car parades. But beyond the physical implications, its’s had notable mental and emotional ones too.

I know that I, for one, will never again take for granted “simple” things like gathering of friends together to celebrate birthdays, like hugging friends without hesitation and fear, like going to church in a physical building with 100 other people, and like seeing my parents from less than a 6 foot distance.

So, I guess you could say the golden birthday celebration isn’t exactly going according to plan.

This whole past year of being 26 hasn’t gone quite how I planned either. Just 2 weeks after my 26th birthday, I woke up with a headache. I have a history of migraines so I figured I just needed to treat it, get some rest, and would probably (hopefully) feel better in a few days. But that’s far from what happened in the days, weeks, and months following that day which has forever changed my life. For those keeping track, two weeks from today will mark the very last day within memory that I did NOT have a headache.

It’s hard, emotionally, to look back on this last year and see the girl who felt so optimisti, so genuinely happy about a new year, a new age, and new opportunities. That girl who never saw this coming, and never knew how to prepare.

2 lumbar punctures, multiple full spine MRIs, 1 dynamic myelogram scan, 5 blood patches, 9 total fibrin glue patches, 3 hospital inpatient stays and 30+ lost pounds later, I think it’s fair to say this year wasn’t easy on me. I have had more outpatient appointments, blood draws, scans and painful procedures than I could ever even try to estimate. I’ve felt like a pin cushion, a lab rat, and a mysterious patient who just desperately wants to STOP stumping all of the specialists. I no longer desire to be a “very interesting case study”. I want out!!

Just the other day when I was planning out my weekend, I thought to myself “ooh, I know! I’ll deaccess my port Saturday morning. That way I can swim & shower & just be needle-free for a day, that will be a real birthday treat!”

Then a half-second later I had another thought that felt like the mental version of a double take. Like wait.... what did I just think about? What did I just say? Did I really just reference having a few hours without a needle embedded in my chest as “A TREAT”?!

So much of my life is now revolved around my illnesses & all that I do continuously to fight to feel halfway decent. And it’s all become so routine, mundane even. Most days I don’t mind at all. But in this brief thought train, somehow tangentially related to my upcoming birthday, I had a much bigger and deeper realization of... when and how did THIS become my life?

I’m trying hard to look forward to 27 with optimism and faith, but I’d be lying if I said that was easy. Celebrating a birthday feels hard right now, and that’s okay.

How does one look forward to a fresh start, a turning of a new leaf, when each previous year has only proven more difficult and painful than the one before it? How does one, in the context of a global pandemic, a history-making anti-racism movement, a country divided by hate and political allegiances and just overall REALLY HEAVY FEELINGS feel truly….. happy? Celebratory?

Then throw in some murder hornets and um yeah, no thanks. I’ll opt out of 2020, please and thank you.

The truth of the matter is that the weight of the world is unimaginably heavy, and I find it impossible to not shoulder some of the burden, to not carry the collective weight upon my shoulders. It’s just who I am and it’s what I do. But it can be exhausting. I am, by nature, a helper. A fixer. A do-er. A smiler. A “pretend everything is fine and everyone will never know you’re not happy”-er. But somehow, on this “happy birthday”, I find the word happy pretty low on the list of emotions running through my veins.

And before the haters come, yes, I fully acknowledge how privileged I am and how privileged of a “problem” this is. But I’ve always promised to share what’s authentically on my heart, which is what I’m doing here today.

I am beyond blessed. I’m blessed to look forward to a birthday next year, and hopefully a Pinterest board that gets dusted off after being pushed to the back burner. I’m blessed to have so many family & friends that I wish I could celebrate with. I am blessed to have memories of so many fun birthday celebrations over the last 26 years. I am blessed in the simple fact that I have never before spent a birthday feeling the ways I do today. I am blessed that I live in a world where I can share these thoughts and feelings and start the types of conversations I wish people were having more often. I am blessed that although I am furloughed, I am still employed and work with people who have become like true family. I am blessed that I am still COVID-free, which isn’t the case for many of rhe members of that family.

Whether or not I feel “happy” about this birthday doesn’t negate the wonderful and beautiful aspects of my life that still exist. 2020 has just made them harder to see, difficult to spot through the thick fog that is composed of the unrest of our country and the heaviness of our hearts.

But, ready or not, the day is here. I don’t have a choice in the matter. 27 has arrived. A new page. A new year to make memories that start with “remember that one time when….”.

Here we go, 27. Please, please be gentle. Please, for the love of God, be even a tiny bit ✨golden ✨.