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!