Die or Live: A Daily Choice?
As Jeri and I drove down to West Virginia on our long weekend vacation, she asked the question, “How are we going to get our life back?” That is a fantastic question and we talked about it 80% of the time we were gone.
The physical piece of Multiple Myeloma will never go away, the treatment right now is routine and we know how to deal with 95% of the side affects. The mental piece, however, we are just starting to pick apart. Even though we both know that we do not want to “die” every day it is really tough to just be in the moment. Everyday (with no exceptions)
Jeff": I will likely not make it much past 65 years old.
Jeri: I don’t want to be without Jeff for the last 20+ of my life.
(We know! Technology will likely give us more time AND we could also beat the odds, but as I learned a long time ago, “One cannot fight emotion with logic.)
Along with counseling and starting a “Grief Class”, we are using vacation stuff to get out of our own heads and work to “live” every day. The location or the activity is really the excuse. The real purpose for now is to get out of the house and get out of our heads. Even if it is only for a few minutes or a few hours.
For my birthday this year, Jeri gave me a map of the 63 USA National Parks. Each park has a sticker. When you have visited a park, you put the sticker on the map. It just so happened that one of those parks was only an hour drive from the place we were staying. So we canceled our Segway tour, got in the car, and visited our first National Park
The New River Gorge was pretty cool. We got lucky and the part of the park we wanted to walk in also was by The Bridge. At one time it was the longest single arch bridge in the world. (Super glad I was NOT on a bike. I do not like ANY bridge!) Our real draw was a short hike through an old growth forest. The trees were not as big as the Redwoods, but they were still very cool. The bonus of the trip, was lunch. At a little convience store in the middle of no where, we found vegan burritos! They were black been and sweet potato and probably the best meal we had all weekend. (The Greenbrier tried to be vegan friendly, but this is not one of their strengths.)
As we drove home to Michigan we of course talked again about “How do we get our life back?” Despite an 11 hour drive, we did not figure it out. (Surprise! Surprise!) What we do know is where we are now, where we used to be, and philosophically where we want to be. The one conclusion we came to is over the next 3-6 months we need to carve out a lot of space/time for the two of us to study, cry, evaluate, laugh, prioritize, and generally find a healthy balance so the cancer does not continue to dominate our lives.
Many years ago Jeri and I got involved with LiveSTRONG. It was not cancer, or biking, or Lance Armstrong that first emotionally pulled us in. It was the LiveSTRONG Manifesto. I used to have the full 3 minutes memorized. Today I looked up the opening lines. “We believe in life, your life. We believe in living every minute of it with every ounce of your being. And you must not let cancer take control.” For 2023 cancer did take control of our lives and it needed to. In 2024 we are going to take that control back.
We did choose to take control and live a little our last vacation night. We both ordered pizza - WITH CHEESE! It was great. We have no regrets. We will not be doing that again next weekend. Ha!
SHINE!
The Road Rider
