By Franchesca Cox
Absolutely nothing in this world could have prepared me for that moment of walking away from the purpose I thought my life had. My daughter. Her fight. Her life. The way she’d blow all the doctors and medicine away. And all their stupid science and confused faces. I thought I had it all figured out. I remember walking down a long hallway as the sun set through giant glass windows, on our last day with a purpose there. We didn’t belong anymore. I was a walking corpse, emptied, split wide open. I still cannot believe we got anywhere in that last car ride home.
Since that day there has been this mantra playing over and over deep within.
I can do hard things, I have done the impossible.
I did not believe I would make it. Others swore that I would be okay, and that offended me the most, because at the time I didn’t even want to entertain the idea of ever being okay. The aftermath of grief felt like a comfortable place to crawl up and die.
But once again, humanity proved me wrong. Humanity is unreliable at best.
The danger of surviving something so catastrophic is that you ride on this cloud of invincibility. You throw caution to the wind, because – quite literally – you often have very little or nothing to lose.
My own humanity that convinced myself that I could never be happy again was wrong. Dead wrong. Life isn’t a dream, but it isn’t half bad. It’s actually this impossible kind of crazy good.
The danger of surviving something so catastrophic is that you ride on this cloud of invincibility. You throw caution to the wind, because – quite literally – you often have very little or nothing to lose.
You go for things you would have never tried before.
You say things even you find surprising.
You give up on things you realize you can’t fix.
You harness your energy more efficiently. The whole life is too short thing. Suddenly abundantly clear. And suddenly fewer arguments.
You feel more intensely. All the feels. The good. The indescribably perfect. The serene. The ugly. The wretched. The brutal. The hilarious.
