I have to say, I’m not yet sure that I’m 100% comfortable sharing the details of all that has transpired with all of the world. I suppose in some way that makes it real in a way that ignoring it publicly does not. With that said, 2010 has been a trial unlike any I’ve ever experienced and I feel a bit like the only way to really move on is to confront it…so I’ve made the gut-wrenching decision to do so. We spent the first few months of 2010 battling an attypically stressful home-buying process that blissfully concluded on March 1 when we closed on our first house. After a couple of long years of grasping to pull all the loose threads of our lives together, we finally felt like the pieces were falling into place. Sadly, our bliss was short lived. On March 6, a dear friend and her fiancé were involved in a tragic car accident. He died later that evening. On March 10, as she fought for her life in a hospital, we paid our final respects to the man who was the father of her little boy and one of the kindest souls I’ve ever known. That same day, as if the universe was playing a cruel joke, Mike and I learned he had been laid off for the upcoming school year, just nine days after we had committed to what felt like a lifetime of mortgage payments. My world seemed to be filled with unspeakable grief. The following week, on Saint Patrick’s Day, the last of our hopes were dashed as we in turn said goodbye to my friend. She was 33. Her fiancé was 34. They left behind a four year old boy who was the light of their lives.

The spring and early summer were a whirlwind of emotions. Mike spent it job hunting, I spent it soul searching. I cried. Perhaps more than I ever knew possible at that point. I struggled every day just to make myself believe that what I had to do that day mattered. And as grief has a tendency of doing, finally the clouds seemed to part. After months of anxiety, fear, anger, and anguish, Mike finally secured a job for this upcoming school year. I gradually seemed to come to grips with all that had transpired and we moved forward.

I remember June 30 with great clarity. Mike and I had both received good news on the professional front that day and, once again, we thought the pieces were coming together. We celebrated by releasing ourselves of our evening duties (blogging, curriculum writing, house chores) and spent the evening floating in the pool. We went to bed that night abuzz with excitement and positivity. I remember it just felt so good. But 2010 wasn’t done with us yet.

In the middle of the night, I heard my phone vibrating. Now, it has to be noted that my phone used to always be on vibrate at bedtime so I wouldn’t hear the choir of Blackberry dings and dongs as text messages, BBMs and emails hit my phone while I slept. Prior to that night, I had never woken up to the vibrations because I keep my phone across the room and these days I’m so exhausted when my head hits the pillow that it takes a lot more than a little buzzing to wake me up. But that night, it woke me up. And from across the room I thought to myself, “That’s buzzing too much to be an email. Someone is calling.” I should have assumed it was one of my crazy friends or family members (all far hipper than I and known to be out during the week) drunk dialing me. I should have assumed that and ordinarily I would have been right. Some boyfriend dumped someone or someone had a fight with their husband. But, of course. It was not going to be that simple.

That phone call changed my life, likely irreparably, and I know that middle of the night conversation is one I’ll always remember. It’s the kind of call you never forget. My 21 year old cousin had been involved in accident, hit by a car at 60 miles per hour while crossing the road. My entire family had just gotten to the hospital where they were sitting vigil. The doctors were warning them that he was showing no signs of brain activity. My heart stopped. My lungs stopped. My legs gave out. And, just like that, my life and the lives of the people I love most were changed forever. Somehow I managed to put on a hoodie, wake Mike up, get us into the car and then ride in the passenger seat clutching my heart for the next hour as we drove to my hometown. Two weeks of sitting in a hospital, crying until my insides hurt, planning a funeral and saying goodbyes that felt bitterly premature followed. It was, hands down, the most traumatizing experience of my life. Had you told me in March that I was going to turn around four months later and experience a grief that hurt ten times as bad, I’d have called you a liar. Now I know better.

As if things couldn’t get more stressful, my father has spent the last month in and out of various emergency rooms battling complications associated with gall stones that went ignored for far too long. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t now jump with dread every time my phone rings. I am completely and utterly convinced that anything that can happen will happen. Above all, I now believe with every fiber of my being that life is simply too damn short to be anything other than blissfully happy. And so the soul searching has commenced yet again as I struggle to ask of myself any number of questions. If I die tomorrow, will I have done enough for the world? If I only have today or this month or this year, am I happy every day the way I should be? Am I grateful enough? Am I making an impact? Am I giving enough to others? Am I putting my best foot forward as often as I can? I’m not sure I have any of those answers yet, but I think I can promise unequivocally that life is going to change for us. Hopefully in new, better, more positive ways, because I feel in my heart that all of life’s road blocks this year have been set before me as a test. To get over them, to surpass them, to survive them, to be better because of them. And to hopefully be able to look back and say “yes” to all of those questions. Yes. I am happy enough, grateful enough, doing enough, making an impact, giving enough and being the best me I can every day I’m lucky enough to be here.

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“Okay. I know this is the first time on a Peeds rotation for some of you, not for others. But I wanted you to understand that I run my Peeds unit a little differently. This is not general surgery in miniature. These are tiny humans. These are children. They believe in magic, they play pretend, there is fairy dust in their IV bags and they cross their fingers and they make wishes and that makes them more resilient than adults. They recover faster, survive worse. they believe. In Peeds, we have miracles and magic and in Peeds, anything is possible.”

I believe in magic and fairy dust, too. Or at least I want to believe. I like to think we aren’t all world-hardened and embittered. I like to cross my fingers, make wishes and believe in miracles. Even if you can’t see it, I do believe that anything is possible and dreams do come true.

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So. To answer the age old question, “does it feel different?” Yes. And no. No in the sense that I didn’t wake up to butterflies and rainbows and the stuff cheesy chick flicks are made of the morning I first woke up with a wedding band. Our relationship is largely the same, the good and the bad, and nothing revolutionary has been altered with the signing of a marriage license. Yes in the sense that now there is an extra sense of contentment, an even deeper understanding of partnership and foundation. Oh. And our coffee table is no longer consumed with the scraps of DIY projects and empty rolls of Xyron adhesive. (Which is a huge bonus of marriage if you consult my inner clutter-hating neat freak.)

Oh! Most notably, I finally have healthcare coverage for the first time in years. It’s definitely good to be the spouse of a teacher with the benefits that come from being an employee of New York State – after years of worrying and paying for healthcare out of pocket, I officially have great coverage again and that’s a huge relief. I’ll save my rant about the cluster that is our healthcare system for another post, but for now I can tell you simply that I’m happy to finally be covered again.

So, with that said – how did you spend your first 100 days of marriage? Did they feel any different to you or was it status quo?

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I ancticipate that for much of our generation, “where were you on September 11th?” will continue to be a question asked long into the future although perhaps not with great frequency. My 9/11 story isn’t all that spectacular but I will share it anyway…

On September 11, 2001 I had been a college student for a just a few short weeks and at the time the first plane hit I was making my daily commute to campus for a 9:00 class. I heard about the first plane hit on the radio during the drive. I was listening to a station where the DJs are notorious for playing elaborate jokes and weaving incredible hoaxes. I was pretty shocked as I listened to the DJs announce the plane hit and kind of dismissed it as a sick joke.

By the time I got to campus I had a sense that it probably wasn’t a joke because there were strange gatherings of people clustered here and there with heads bowed in deep discussion. As I entered the main building on campus there was a very uncomfortable buzz about the place that thickened as I entered the academic wing of the building where a lot of people were gathered before going into class. The door to the classroom I was expected to be in was locked and a group of my classmates sat outside. Many students at JCC are in the military or spouses of military servicemen because of my home town’s close proximity to a prominent military base in Upstate NY and therefore it wasn’t unusal that one of my classmates was there in unifrom. What was very unusual was that when he overheard my classmates discussing what had happened [apparently he hadn't heard yet] he got a look of panic in his eyes and quickly lifted his ruck onto his back. “Tell Professor Johnson I had to go!” he said as he took off in a run down the hall. I started after him until word started to spread through the building about the second plane hit and with it, all classes were cancelled for the day.

Making my way downstairs I met up with two of my close friends and we spent a couple of hours in the auditorium watching the live news coverage with much of the campus community. We then spent a good part of the day at one of my friend’s houses trying to come to terms with what was happening. We were young, only 18, and to us this was unfathomable. Later in the day we went to Friendly’s for dinner. We were trying to just keep moving forward and not become one of those people glued to the tv reliving over and over the occurances of that morning. When we walked into the place nearly the entire staff was in the dining room and the manager had brought a small 13″ television in and set it up at one of the booths so patrons could continue to watch the news coverage. I think that is when I truly realized that this was a huge deal, a lot bigger than anything I could have imagined. When I showed up to work later and found out we were closing for the night this knowledge was confirmed and I went home and spent the night quietly in front of the tv.

The aftermath of Septmeber 11th in my community was perhaps different than in most others. Fort Drum is one of the most prominent military bases in the nation. As soon as the terrorist attacks occured our community became very aware of what this meant. The base went on lockdown nearly immediately and surrounding the gates the presence of MPs was at a level I had never experienced. It wasn’t long before many of the area soldiers were deployed to Afghanistan and left behind frightened spouses, children and friends. Among those to go was the husband of a good friend I worked with. I spent a year watching her mourn September 11th and suffer the affects it had had on her life. As proud as she was of her husband, as happy as she was to have him alive, the idea of what might happen was never far from her mind as he missed their first Christmas together and eventually their first anniversary. All around us people were going through the same things where in other communities I believe people largely moved on. Now in Watertown there is a constant ebb and flow as soldiers continue to deploy and return from Afghanistan and Iraq. It’s always with us there. It’s there in the eyes of the children who have parents at war and in the grief of widows, widowers, friends and family as soldiers return home in flag-draped coffins. For those who say 9/11 is a thing of the past, I assure you, it is not.

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“I’ve come to realize that the only thing we can truly expect in life is the unexpected. Expectations, in one fashion or another, inevitably fail to come to fruition with great regularity, and for that reason one should never claim to know the ending of the story when they are still in the first chapters of the book. Never has this been more true than in my own life. There were things I fully planned on happening that never came to pass. The were other things I would have bet my life on never happening that unfolded in a series of unanticipated events that dramatically altered the course of my life forever. Occurrences I would have believed would break me, paved a road to a greater happiness than I had ever previously experienced and in the process, set me free from self-imposed constraints I never realized existed. A year ago, two years ago, three years ago…I never would have imagined I would be where I am today with regards to life, love, career, family nor geography. Perhaps with some irony, I could not be happier to be where I am, and that has served to make me keenly aware of just how uncertain life is, both in beautiful and tragic ways. This weekend marked a major turning point in the direction my life will go from this point forward, and it brings me to the blissful realization that we should always expect the unexpected, and that we should love the journey no matter how unpredictable.”

Amen to that.

And what, pray tell, was going on the weekend of March 30, 2008? We had just picked out my engagement ring, shown here with my custom wedding band…

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