Two autumns ago, our world unraveled. My husband’s mother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died. Our youngest son took a helmet to the neck in a football game and spent the next four weeks convalescing. I ran over someone’s dog. Our neighbor fell off his porch, broke his neck, and died. We left our church due to an intractable conflict and we brought bed bugs home from a hotel. It was the most difficult season of our adult lives.
Obviously, when we flipped the calendar from October to November, it wasn’t as if everything suddenly turned around. Sizable checks were written to the bed bug sniffing beagle and the man who baked our house to 140 degrees. We had a bereaved neighbor and family members to support and new jobs to be found. Our emotions swirled and eddied, swiftly heading for one precipitous drop after another.
On the way to leaving our eldest at college — and just before all of the calamity hit — we visited Niagara Falls. Normally, I find water soothing and comforting but not there; the speed and the sheer force of the water as it plunged down those 160 feet terrified me. Niagara Falls is symbolic of how utterly out of control life can be. It was a prophetic pit stop though we did not know it at the time.
To read the remainder, please click here.