NGU GETS UP, AGAIN AND AGAIN ...

I love every encouraging email, text, patio visit, and phone call (fielded by Will) as well as delicious meals, batches of cookies, colorful bouquets of blooms and small tender-hearted gifts received from family and friends—and though I admit to two or three desperately unhappy meltdowns during difficult months of chemo preceding recent surgeries, it’s also true that this past year has seen emergent bursts of courage inspiring my spirit to sooth physical miseries while I continue to carve out a path toward healing all of me by focusing my mind’s eye upon achieving that goal, step by step, with patience intact for these reasons—when it comes to lengthy recoveries from life saving surgeries, this is, by far, not my first rodeo, and since this last year has been spent moving forward through my most challenging recovery, ever, my family continues to rally around, offering heartfelt encouragement, daily, and adding to my good fortune, I get along with an outpouring of help from my friends.😘

So though I write a lot about personal need to amass a host of inner strengths over each person’s lifetime, I believe that we who grew up within the loving embrace of family and friends, find ourselves heading toward healing from life’s adversities more thoroughly than those whose role models proved to be passive aggressive, emotionally distanced or over wrought, hand wringing adults who did little more than pace, back and forth, creating threadbare rugs while crying into half empty cups.

I watched my dad cry after losing one business to bad investment followed by another to fire without sufficient insurance to cover his losses.  Then, having watched my first hero release suppressed emotion, naturally, I was there when he dried his eyes and saw his way, clearly, toward making sound use of intuitive creativity, which set a plan into action that saved Dad’s dream house (which, alongside our delighted father, we watched rise up from below ground level to include a pair of spacious second floor bedrooms) from being sold out from under him.

While watching my dad

Fall down

Get up

Fall down

Get up

Get up

Get up

Get up

And recover, Rocky Style, so determined was he to take loving care of his family, he’d had no conscious clue of how often he’d inspired his daughters to take hold of and run with the baton until one day, after I’d been transferred out of the ICU, Dad asked me where my spirited attitude had gathered so much in the way of inner strength, and without so much as a moment’s hesitation, my drug-soaked smile replied—from spending my life watching you and mom stand up to adversity, again and again ... more fleshing in of my sleepy reply to my beloved, courageous father will be penned in a story at a later date.  

🙋🏻‍♀️❤️🤕💃🏻