Time. When that is all you want.

Some river in Glacier, everything
is SO beautiful!  While Utah
scorched in the 3 digits, we sat
at in the pleasant 70's and 80's.
Hmmm. Why don't we live here?!?

I lost a cancer friend this week.  I don't think she made it to her 2 year anniversary - she would have told our group.  She reached out to me immediately after her first zoom group meeting.  She had tons of questions and concerns, I had a few answers.  I helped her know that what she was thinking/feeling/anxious about was totally normal.  It was OK to be angry and grieve what won't be.  We became fast friends!

When we go in for a chemo infusion, there are always labs.  When they looked at her liver numbers, it was trouble.  They ran more tests and figured out that tumors had blocked the main bile duct, so she was out of options.  They gave her 2-4 weeks and sent her home on hospice.

We spent the last week in Montana, specifically Glacier National Park.  It was a bittersweet trip for me because that was something I had on my bucket list.  Wednesday was our 28th anniversary, it was a happy day.  That was the day we picked up a ton of rocks on a riverbank that are the Montana colors: red, green, black and everything in between.  We joked a lot about how silly it was to fill the back of the Pilot with rocks!  I'm putting said rocks in our park strip to make it a little more interesting.

Mat researched the "short" hikes along the Road to the Sun and to Lake McDonald.  I can hike downhill all day long, getting back up is another story.  I am so out of shape physically and emotionally.  I had to stop every 30-40 feet to let my heart slow down and catch my breath.  I apologized to Mat every time, he is always patient, supportive and helpful.  He would never be annoyed that I can't keep up with him. 

It was Sunday morning when I read the news that Tina had passed away.  We were driving through Idaho, I just looked at Mat and said, "Tina's gone".  He understood why I was so emotional.  I had a war in my head for a while, thinking about how unfair and wrong it is that people my age (and younger ... and older) die from this disease that I have, and are forced to mourn what will be left behind.  I stayed silent for a while, Mat understood why.

Sunday we drove 3 hours out of our way to fulfill another experience from my bucket list - biking the Hiawatha trail in eastern Idaho.  We couldn't get bikes sooner than that.  This was the same day I found out about Tina.  It's a 14 mile trail one way, "all downhill" is what I heard about it.  You bike through the dark tunnels that eventually open up to beautiful vistas of wilderness, then a ways down, another tunnel and another view point.  They have people that "sweep" the trail, do their own riding to check for people that need help, but also to make sure the last bikers make it out on time.

I'm glad we did it but it was another experience I really struggled with physically and emotionally.  The first two miles are through a completely dark, dripping wet and muddy train tunnel. Everyone had little lights on their bikes so you could see who was coming the other way, but I struggled to keep the bike from slipping on the mud.  All I can see is what I'm about to run over.  I was trying hard to keep the bike steady and avoid the small children coming at me. I was pretty uptight when we finally finished back where the trail started.  I was grateful to be in the sun again with our car close by, ready for loading our bikes to return them.

My sister has a better phone than mine, she caught
the Aurora the night before we got to her cabin in
northern Idaho.  We were anxiously watching the
apps, but they didn't give us a show in Montana. 

I wish we had the flexibility to move somewhere else.  Like northwest Montana, or Alaska, or Pacific NW, or any number of places! That was always a bucket list thing for me, to break out of Utah and explore other options.  We should have done it when it was feasible, when the kids were little.  It's hard to do when we depend on the steady job with great insurance, and a world class cancer hospital so close.  We'll continue traveling, we have a tropical adventure coming up in the fall.  Then we'll make more plans after that trip.  Mat is so good to me!  We've been through our fair share of trials, but we support each other and work together.  I love him more now than I could have 28 years ago!

Gratitude and Grumbling

A funny meme from 2020-still true!

I had a long talk (and lunch) today with one of my favorite people, Wanda Murphy, a.k.a. Sister Rhoades.  We were mission companions in Heidelberg Germany.  Old City Heidelberg has a city center where the homes have orange clay tiles for roofs, it has a fußgängerzone (pedestrian plaza) where we spent countless hours, weeks, months street contacting. That's where the old drunk Albanian man proposed to me.  It's one of the towns where, even when things weren't going well with the work, we could laugh and "lift" each other when we needed it.  We prayed hard, worked hard, and we laughed hard!  Sometimes we cried hard too.  We scored a lot of gelato from the cute Italians (man, they were handsome men!) from the shop below our apartment.  We had an appointment scheduled in a place where we had to ride the bus, not a street car.  When we got off the bus, a man, probably drunk, came toward us.  When he got too close to Wanda, she started swinging her bag full of Books of Mormon to keep him at a distance.  And then we laughed hysterically at the irony of keeping away him away from us with a bag full of Books of Mormon!  😂.  Heidelberg is where we met our Russian friends, Zourab and his sister, Maya.  They lived in a very dumpy part of town where the refugees lived.  We had a district leader who would call us every night and say, "Was haben Sie haute getan, um das Himmelreich Gottes aufzubauen?"  What did we do today to build up the kingdom of God?  We worked our butts off, and we ate a lot of Milke Sahnecreme and gelato.  She helped me love all people and she continues to be such a positive influence on me, I'm so grateful when we can get together.  I hope I'm remembering all those details correctly.  If nothing else, it makes for some good stories!

As the story goes, I got to Utah State fall quarter 1993 and ALL I WANTED was to have Sister Rhoades with me!  So I coerced her (that's what it felt like on my end) to come to Logan and start school winter quarter. And she came!  Winter quarter--when I was dating Mat long distance.  I ended up moving home after that quarter to be closer to Mat, "just in case." I felt so guilty getting her up there just to leave after she came.  She's teaching nursing at the technical college in Roosevelt and Vernal now.  She said there's no way she would have worked so hard for a degree in nursing, then teaching it if she hadn't gone to Utah State.  I told her how I've never forgotten how bad I felt after getting her up there, then moving home.  I hadn't thought about this experience until she brought it up in our conversation, there's a little guilt I can let go of.  

I got a text a week or two ago from McKinley.  We were outside working on our park strip with a little help from McKinley.  She laid down on the grass in the shade, obviously something was off.  A neighbor up the street was walking down with her daughter with arm loads of food for us!  Of course, I'm so grateful anytime anyone thinks of us in that way!  Well, McKinley told me in her text that she doesn't understand why I'm so happy when she's holding in her pain.  

The next morning, we had a chat about how every one of us gets to decide how to handle hard things.  I assured her that in the beginning, and a little since then, it was so hard, and I was so angry, and questioned Gods timing and will for us.  But eventually, I could turn it around and see the good that was coming from my cancer, even when it's terminal!  And if she's sad or mad, she can talk to us, and it's totally normal to be mad and sad and angry and cry about this.  She just had her 13th birthday.  In October 2017, I said my goal was to get to her to high school graduation and my doctor said "let's see what we have to do to get you there!".  Frankly, I don't think I'll last that long.  I'm not being a pessimist or negative, I genuinely feel like crap sometimes and can't see that far out.  I think I will see her to high school, but probably not graduation (2028 if I'm calculating correctly).  

I feel like there's something going on in my torso, but nothing has come up on scans that way.  Remember, my liver is where this all started.  At the very least, I have an organ in there that is compromised.  I sincerely hate thinking about this, but as time goes on, the clock speeds up.  I'm going to keep on going, whatever it takes, until I say otherwise.  That WON'T happen until our 30th anniversary, 2 more years, because we made a goal on our 15th anniversary that we would make it to our 30th.  

Sorry to end this on a downer!  I really am OK most of the time, but this topic never leaves my mind.  I don't know how to be a "normal" person anymore, so I try to fake it the best I can.  On another note, I "had" 19,000 pictures in my laptops photos app--which are no longer in my photos app.  They are still on my phone, and backed up to Google and Amazon and an external drive (I hope).  But it's alarming to see nothing when I want to add a picture to the blog!