2017 and 2018 have left me feeling slightly more lucky than Wile E. Coyote. While I don’t think a piano plummeting to the ground will flatten me any time soon, I have had my life shaken so much over the past two years that my best-laid plans for the recent years have been unceremoniously scrambled beyond any contingency plan I could have come up with.
Early in 2017 we celebrated my grandmothers 85th birthday and said good-bye to my grandfather’s long-time friend I called “Grandpa. Just weeks later, grandma was hospitalized due to falling and breaking her hip. From there the events accelerated at a rapid pace. It was a “catastrophic heart attack”. Decisions had to be made quickly. Hospice. A big and scary word. This is the grandmother who helped me with my homework, watched me while my mother studied and taught her own classes and essentially stood in where a second parent should have been. This seriously impacted my footing in life as I knew it.
Most of 2017 was a blur and I vowed that I would get things back together in 2018. That idea seems hilarious now, especially with the series of events that happened in 2018:
2018 Timeline
January brought the death of a cousin on my mom’s side.
In February, we lost my great uncle on my biological father’s side.
In March, we lost my great aunt on my mother’s side.
In April, we lost another great aunt on my mother’s side.
In May, we lost another great uncle on my biological father’s side.
Then a very close friend lost her husband too.
In June, some pain that I had been coping with for a number of years became too much. I resumed my search for a specialist who would help me to find a way to cope. Long story short, at the end of July I went in for major surgery. While I do not regret having the surgery, it has certainly changed what I thought my life would look like in the years to come.
I had no idea that surgery would zap my energy so much. I had no idea that my body would not just bounce back to normal like it does after the flu. Really I just had NO IDEA.
Why do I bring all this up?
Usually at this time of year, I recap my goals. I plan my next year’s goals.. This year I felt like I needed to offer an honest view of what my life has been like, a ‘behind the lens’ view, if you will. This has been a two-year span of hard losses and lessons in coping.
I am putting this all out there to illustrate that so often we only see little windows into a person’s reality. Even this blog post is barely skimming the surface. Some years are harder than others. Some years it is ok to tell people that your personal life is crazy. I do my best to never let my personal problems interfere with my photography. That’s what contingency plans are for. Fortunately, I have a strong network of friends who have come to my aid when I needed them, just as I have for them in the past. That is one thing I love about my local photography guild affiliations like Professional Photographers of Oklahoma and INPPA. The friends who I have made there have become an extension of my family.
