I remember the first time I went to NIH for a surgery.  John & I took his father down, spent the day in the surgical waiting room and were able to see Alan in the ICU that evening as he crawled out of anesthesia and began working on recovery.

I’ve done it twice now with John, deliriously tired, pacing a hospital I have come to know.  Watching the clock.  Reminding myself not to panic.  Finally finding my husband in ICU, his face flushed and his words groggy.  But back.

This past Friday John and I celebrated our fifth wedding anniversary.  Our tenth year of togetherness.  Time is a strange and wonderful phenomenon.  “This too shall pass’ is one of the truest sayings that exists.  ‘Time heals all’.  Another good one.

But sometimes things circle around and you find yourself facing the same demons you’ve conquered in the past.  This morning we woke up at 3am (I use ‘woke up’ loosely because I’m still not sure I’m awake) and journeyed to Elmira, NY for Alan’s latest surgery.  And we are in another surgical waiting room.  Eating fast food.   Waiting.  Bleary-eyed.

The waiting is the worst.

Nothing makes the time go faster.  And as it slips past (slower than usual) it feels painfully wasted and, conversely, painfully important.

In the end, we are all small beings moving through our small lives with their ups and downs and twists and turns.  Nothing occurring will be remembered in 100 years or prove to be significant in any way.  Which makes the significance in this moment, to these people (myself included) heartbreakingly poignant.

Did I mention I was tired?  Yes.  Very tired.

Also introspective, contemplative.

We each shape our stories with our attitudes, our thoughts, our beliefs.  The things we place value in, the way we choose to articulate ourselves.  We can be positive, negative, optimistic, realistic, pessimistic.  We can find comfort or insult in any action.  We have been gifted the divine right to choose.

Today feels like deja vu.  And also, nothing like deja vu.  As my shoulders and back burn & ache from fatigue.  And my eyelids lay heavily across my pupils.  And I’m intermittently bone-numbingly cold and uncomfortably stale & warm.

I need to sleep.  And sweat.  And stretch.  And drink green smoothies or juice — or anything that feels nutritious in any way.

But all I can do right now is breathe.  And wait.  And be as strong as I can be for my husband, who is the strongest man in the world.

I woke up this morning; the sky was a pale, rain-washed blue and the air crisp in the early morning ~ a welcome change from yesterday’s muggy warmth.  December had begun.

Fourteen years ago, my grandfather passed away on December 1st.  I’d only known one grandfather ~ my mother’s father ~ and I hadn’t known him very well.  Three thousand miles of vast blue ocean lay between where I was born and raised and where my mother’s family lived.  But I’d loved my grandfather.  With his thick, white hair and equally thick, cable-knit sweaters.  He wore slacks, and a collared shirt every day that i knew him.  He took long walks around the walls of Berwick-Upon-Tweed with a pair of heavy binoculars (the better for bird-watching) and he spent his afternoons in the sitting room on the second floor of their home.  Sometimes reading with the radio crackling in the background.  Sometimes watching sport on the TV.  I watched several summer Olympics in that room with my Grandfather.

He’d been sick for a long time prior to leaving us all.  But death still catches everyone off -guard and death is irreversible.  Nothing could bring him back once he’d gone — not for an apology, a last cup of tea or round of golf.  Not for a final conversation, his words carefully chosen and his Scottish lilt humming like a lullaby.

I loved my Grandfather.  I loved his thoughtfulness, his quiet consideration.  When David and I were little (David was named for him), he took us to the library in Berwick and we were allowed to check out a book each.  I remember several inconsequential things about that book — that it had a huge silver square in the front cover (probably a scan, or tracking device for the library); that its inner cover was orange and yellow and the pictures were big, and colorful, the words large black font along the top.  I believe it was about dinosaurs (Dave & I liked dinosaurs).  But what I remember most was Grandpa allowing us to climb into his big arm-chair onto his lap, and wrapping his arms around us, he read us those books.  He explained the things that confused us. He taught us.

My grandfather truly valued education.  I think – maybe – he thrived on it.  All his children are very intelligent and curious.  Some use this gift to continue learning, some use it to control other people.  I guess that’s how intelligence works.

One of my very last conversations with him happened when I was twenty-one years old, and I’d come to visit my English family during my semester studying in Rome.  We were in the sitting room, Grandpa in his arm-chair, me on the sofa.  We were having tea.  He asked me about my studies.  What I was learning about while in Rome.  What I liked, what i didn’t.  We talked about the art of taking notes during class.  It was the most adult conversation I ever had with him.  Maybe he saw my mother in my eyes — in my smile.  Maybe he heard her in my words.  I think my mother is the most like my Grandfather of all five of her siblings.  (Well, the grandfather I knew.  He was different when they were young — damaged by the war, angry at life perhaps, for its cruelty).

I know he loved me.  He loved me, and he loved my brother – even when he didn’t understand us.  He loved my mother and he loved my father.  He did the best he could by us – even though we were so far away, so foreign to him.

The morning he died, we’d taken family pictures in the living room before Dave & I headed back to school.  My Mama Bear wanted to send them to him, to he and my Granny, since Grandpa was so sick, and in hospital in Melrose (for some reason that name sticks with me).  Dave and I got in the car and had a painfully long ride back to Penn State.  My mother called me — twice.  Once, to find out where I was, the second time when I was unpacking in my room.  I don’t remember what she said.  It was calm at first.  Her voice was even.  But I remember crumbling, as though my legs suddenly gave out.  I lay in a ball on the floor of my room.  The carpet was hunter green.  I cried for a long time.

I ate Thanksgiving leftovers for dinner that night.  Watched an episode of “Band of Brothers” with my roommate.  I don’t think I will ever forget those details.  The feeling of the carpet, the smell as I gasped for breaths while sobbing.  The texture of the blankets on the couch while I lay, nearly comatose, staring and not seeing the TV.

I think of him often.  And I always think of him today.  I also think of him on May 17th — his birthday and the day I graduated from college (a fitting tribute to him, I think).  I graduated six months after he died, so it was a bittersweet day — May 17, 2003.  But I am eternally grateful for the gifts he gave me.  Grateful for the DNA I have from him, for my love of academia, the way my brain works.  I am grateful for the time I had with him, for the memories that I will try to never lose.

Things happen so quickly.

For months, we were all building up to our family visit, and then before you knew it, everyone was back home, having survived a whirlwind of intensity for several days, but now onto other things in life. My brother is at home, and his epic ‘Dazed & Confused’ party is today.  And then, before you know it, Jo will be flying back to France.  And Dave will be heading to South America to climb another mountain.

For John & I ~ we have dinner at our favorite restaurant for our anniversary (three years of wedded bliss!!! eight years since our first date!!!) and then a trip to Iceland to celebrate his 35th birthday.  Moving to yet another new office & then my work people coming over for food (the pressure!) and new restaurants opening.  Heading to Jackson Hole again (after four years! how has it been that long?!?) in September.  Football, holidays.

When we were little, time stretched lazily before us.  Summer days filled with buzzing bees, mud pies, exotic explorations into the depths of the neighborhood woods.  Bike rides and stick hockey.  Whole worlds could be formed and destroyed in the time between when you fled the house in the morning until you trekked home as the sun began to sink in the sky, hungry for dinner.  Imagination was king.  Inconsequential things were full of untold magic.

The weather this year has been strange. We went from 50 degree days of gray skies and rain to full-fledged summer in less than a week.  Today the high is 90, and we’ve already shut the windows and switched on the A/C.  This morning, as we sipped coffee and waited for Dora to arrive, we ruminated on the fact that come July, we will have lived in our own house for a full year.  And we’ve furnished and decorated it.  And paid the mortgage on time.  We are fully grown up.

Adulthood is odd.  It seems to be a constant exercise in filling time. Categorizing things in our worlds to create order and sense.  We all slog to work, and then flee home.  We cook dinners.  We have children.  We begin the process all over again.

Why?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

Not to be depressing, but what’s the point?  I mean, yes, I like my nice house and my slick car.  I like my husband’s Jeep and driving with the roof off.  I like ordering clothing online, and buying insane facial products. I like having sushi twice a week. I like all those things, so I work in order to have the money to pursue what I like.  But honestly, what’s the point?  Each person’s life is a grain of sand on a huge beach in relationship to time.  We are all scurrying here and there, learning languages and looking at art (well, sort of.  I mean, people don’t do that as much any more).  We’re suing people, and being audited.  We’re updating labor laws, and stream-lining tax processes.

Why?

Is it to give ourselves some sort of purpose? I mean, IS there a greater purpose? Is there a reason that a tiny blue planet, third from the sun of THIS solar system, is populated by bi-pedal creatures without body hair? What is the reasoning behind their existence/ their evolution?  What is the grand plan?  If – in the end – things mean nothing at all, then shouldn’t we all re-focus how we spend our 80 – 100 years breathing?

For me, I guess it all comes back to children.  I never had a strong desire to have children.  But now, John and I are in the minority of people our age without them.  Everyone says that having children is life’s greatest purpose.  But … seriously, why?

So they can grow up, and slog to work and flee home… cook dinners, do laundry.  Have more kids? Somehow, that just doesn’t fully make sense to me.  (I know I will be told it’s because I don’t have children, so I couldn’t understand.  Totally fair.  But I’m not going to pop out a child just to see if that somehow changes things for me).

Anyway.  I’ve found that the older I get, the faster time goes by.  Like how an hour-glass always looks like it’s speeding up as it nears the end of the sand.  Everything happens so fast.  Nothing lasts long enough.  Days slip by in a blink.  We all still feel like we’re seventeen.

But we’re not.

There are moments in life that take the breath right out of you.

You’d thought you had every side protected, every loose string accounted for — but that small sliver of weakness leaves you raw and exposed and it’s so sudden, and so unexpected, you spend a fair amount of time staring into space, uncomprehending.

Marriage isn’t easy.  I feel super blessed, because I married the right man and we are best friends — he’s my favorite person to be with, to laugh with, to hold hands.  But marriage isn’t just about two people who dig each other’s company. It’s so much more than that.  It’s every breath, it’s every challenge, it’s every triumph.  It’s every mountain, whether you want to climb it or not.  John and I have been together for over seven years (!!!) and we’ve faced poverty, multiple sclerosis, MEN type I, our parents health (which includes cancer on both sides), difficult family relations, a dog who is a vegetarian, frustrations at work, depression …. The list is not short.  We’ve also found solace in each other, in the quiet moments eating soup and watching mindless TV, in buying a house together, in traveling to new and exciting places, in brother-in-laws, in food and wine and football.  And I know that no matter what we come across on this road of life, we’ll get through it together.

Eight years ago, my grandmother died.  She ate steak and banana cream pie at the casino days before she passed away, so she went out on a good note — I hope.  I miss her every day — not in that aching, I-can’t-continue-to-live kind of way.  But in the I-wish-I-could-call-and-b.s.-on-the-phone kind of way.  She moved in with my family when I was five years old, and she made breakfast for my brother and I every morning before school, she was there when we came home, she chased us with a wooden spoon when we made her mad, but she also spoiled us rotten when she thought my parents weren’t looking.  She was stubborn as a mule, and very opinionated but she was every kind of fabulous.  I was her little girl, her only granddaughter.  She bought me so much clothing (in an attempt to ignite in me her love of fashion and jewelry and perfumes …. it didn’t totally work).  She tried to get me to collect porcelain dolls.  She fed our dogs potato chips.

She died and two months later, I met John.

I think she sent him to me.  I know, I know — it sounds naive and ridiculous.  But I think she knew I would need someone solid beside me for my life’s journey.  She probably knew things I didn’t know yet.  She probably knew the man I was with at her funeral wasn’t the right man for me.  She was right.

Sometimes life takes the breath right out of you.  And nothing seems familiar.  Or fair.  And in the end, I guess you just have to hold your precious people close to you and hope and pray for the best.  You have to believe you’ve made the right decisions.  And if I’ve only made one right decision in my life, it was choosing John.  And I will do anything and everything to protect that, to protect him and to protect us.  And I think that’s the best thing — maybe the only thing — I can really do.