Of all things, today we had already scheduled to sign our Wills & Health Care POA. When we started this whole ‘Will’ thing, the concept of cancer was the farthest from both our minds. We had just booked a trip for January to Tahiti of all places and we were talking about going to the Rodeo in Vegas this December. Now, signing our names on some papers became a sobering event.

On the way to the signing, Suzanne was telling me about the next quilt she was going to work on. Since it was an applique quilt, she told me all about the fabric she would need, the number of fabric colors, the sizes, and the shapes she would need to cut. “I can work on this while we are in the car or anywhere I’m sitting around,” she said. Then she made one of those ‘ton of bricks’ statements. “The last one I did took me 10 years”.

WOW! No, it wasn’t the fact that a quilt took her 10 years to complete, I’ve seen that quilt and it is an amazing piece of art. It’s the fact that my wife, the one I’m planning to spend the rest of my life with, is still planning to do the same.

It has taken some time for her head to arrive at this point; fear of the unexpected, of the unknown, and even of death has plagued us both these past few days. But she clearly has past that stage and entered one of optimism. To her, this will just be a bump in the road of our lives together. It may be a big bump with untold hardship that may be difficult to endure, but once this road has been traveled, we will continue on with our lives together; visiting friends and places we’ve never been; spending more time with grandkids; sitting on the front porch swing, even finishing that new applique quilt.

“Instead of worrying about what you cannot control, shift your energy to what you can create.”

Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart