The overnight bag we had packed wouldn’t carry the essentials needed for the long haul road standing before us. We would take trip after trip, those days bogged down with summer humidity. Brain cancer patient took a back seat that scorching summer to a stroke survivor, as we traversed the unknown worlds of relearning to walk and talk again.
A few moments stick out to me from that long stretch of days, moments that became major threads in the tapestry of who I was and who I was becoming. I had only been recently dating a boy I had a crush on in high school when our cookie-cutter world imploded. We were mostly still strangers after only having a handful of months of hikes, coffee dates, and him serenading me with his guitar. We were still in the honeymoon stage where everything felt magical and we hadn’t shared any pain. But when Dad’s surgery went wrong — who was the one who picked me off the cold hospital floor? He was. He drove the 2.5 hours back and forth between work shifts, almost daily, just to sit and hold my hand in hospital rooms. We didn’t have the history to give us deep roots to keep us grounded when this storm whipped in like a tornado and uprooted everything in its path. But he didn’t care.
