February Rain

 I think it is curious that we talk about the weather so easily, but we don't always talk about our emotions, and yet, we use the weather to explain our feelings.  "I'm under the weather", "I am feeling grey" or we tell people how happy, a sunny, perfect temperature day should not be wasted.  I'm sitting here on a cold, winter night watching the rain come down against my windshield.  The mistyness of the rain would make you think it may start freezing into patterns that stretch across the glass in crystallized growth, but it just isn't cold enough.  This transparent barrier of the outside world is keeping me from the elements and lets me look beyond the rain into the dark outside and returning focus on the many tiny droplets.  A constant changing depth of field of my vision.  The rain fills the voids on the glass as the tiny specks slowly connect into larger drops. If I sit long enough they may overcome the entire glass and start running down in streaks of sadness.  Emotions are similar for me. I can get hit with emotional circumstances over and over, but I don't usually, shed a tear.   Suddenly without warning they well up, all at once; scarcely contained.   The buildup over time leaks out of my eyes.  I'm not sure if it's something that I really want others to see or if I just want to quietly, and in my solitude, allow the emotions to gather and wash down my face.  

I think sometimes, we approach difficult situations like this as women.  I certainly feel like I need to be a source of strength and understanding for others and I want to offer reasonable explanations in life, when things get difficult, maybe that's the mother in me, or maybe that is just me.  I'm finding more and more, that as I grow older,  I understand less and less about myself... and maybe I'm wrong, maybe I understand myself more.  However, there are times that I wish I could be as transparent as the windshield and the rain, letting people see through the droplets and into the darkness.  It is difficult to hold that space when the deluge of emotions rain down all at once and hold you in rhythm and sadness.

It is the night before my sister's surgery.  February 23, 2024.  

I wasn't feeling anything until I was alone in the dark, in a car and I was looking out on a speckled windshield.  I watched each drop hit the glass and my world shattered.  Suddenly the tears just fell out of my eyes and I knew, I knew right away that it was fear.  See, I have been showing a lot of hope and peace with that hope, during all of the procedures and the treatments since June of 2023.  And how could you not hope for this young,  vibrant woman?  Infected by poison, but not defeated by it.  Weakened by treatments, but not kept down.   Her strength became my hope.  But we were at a precipice of insecurity.  On the other side of surgery,  she is gifted with a full healthy recovery, but in between is the darkness of fear.  There will be extreme bodily change.  A loss of organs, but the positive of removing deadly cancer.  And as we look across this precipice and beyond the deep, deep, ravine of insecurity, we see the other side.  Is that hope again?   

We know that after surgery, these things will be done, but we must deal with fear. How will we get there?  You can tell me how the surgery will go. You can tell me the steps the Doctor will take, but it doesn't change the human hands.  And the human judgment that will be looking into that same precipice and darkness at things that haven't been seen. Not fully not with man's eyes.  What do we do with this fear?  What do we do with the loss of hope?  Did we lose hope or are we just being crushed, by the burden of fear?  So it cripples us.  Fear severs our peace and disconnects us from hope.  It keeps us from trying to cross the precipice of insecurity. It keeps us weak.   

It's not the tears that make us weak. 

All the tears running down were building inside of me while I was a sitting few hours away from the hospital where her surgery took place.  That precipice of time and space was too much to handle.  I wanted to be close to her as she went into surgery but I knew it was not an ideal situation.  I would have been trapped in a more uncomfortable place trying to comfort other people instead of feeling my emotions.  At the time, I was worried that if I lost my sister in this major surgery, did I do enough?  Did I support her enough, help her enough, or love her enough?    Flooded by emotion I let the rain fall.

I needed that. 

 

In the process of her treatments, she did everything she could to treat the cancer that ravaged her body unknowingly.  She became my strength.   She came out of surgery successfully and the quote from her own mouth, "I Woke up Feral".  I never thought that sentence would bring so much joy to my sad heart, but from day one to day now, she has never stopped fighting for hope.   She single-handedly stole my heart from the day she was born and she won't ever let it go.  She is the woman I love, who knows me best and isn't afraid to fight.  She was on the other side of my precipice waiting for me to get there.  If I had lost her that day, she would be waiting in a different way.   

Hold your people close, don't waste a day or a moment forgetting that hope.  And when the rain comes, let it.