WHAT WE KNOW

Intro - This week I will begin the writing of a Case Study, along with my Integrative Oncologist, to share my intimate cancer journey with others, so that lives can be healed…and changed.

This is what is essential, that is, that God uses everything we are, everything we’ve been through, to make His way into the hearts of others.  

I remember standing in her closet just behind her thinking how very thin she’d become. We saw one another nearly every day but for some reason, right under my nose, my mama had managed to waste away. It took just six weeks from Jackie’s diagnosis until the moment her body refused to breathe again.

Like a good daughter, I did my best to die along with her, losing 25 pounds to echo her tiny frame,

I told my clients that I was going to be away from my marketing consulting business for what I thought would be just a matter of weeks. In the end, I never returned.

Ushering Jackie into the Kingdom was the best hard work I’ve ever done. It altered the trajectory of my life in unexpected and untold ways.

The dying season changes us. It’s impact, not a temporal thing.
For Mama it ended in twilight rest. For me, it was awakening.

I shared with Ron recently, not in some morbid disposition but with genuine zeal, “I should like to do my very best to give our boys a glimpse of Heaven when I take that final step over the threshold to the other side.”

Cancer, hers and mine, hasn’t diminished me; it has made me more of who I am. We are magnified in dark nights of reckoning, in our wrestling with the mortality of bodies with infinite souls.  

Look closely at this image captured twenty-two years ago. This is when my cancer journey began—
~ When my passion for places started taking second place to healing the interiors within.
~ When I began letting go of everything I thought I was [and wanted] and allowed myself to question and expand.

In the early days without Jackie, I began voraciously studying integrative medicine, then transforming how I lived my life including shifting my business model from designing homes to designing lives.  

When I look at this image of my mama and me, I see the fullness of my future etched in the tiny lines surrounding my bittersweet smile—

You are wrong if you imagine I see cancer. Instead, I see this undeniable purpose waiting there.

When did your purpose awaken? Have you allowed the hard things to mold you into the extraordinary you...you are intended to become?

I am still the girl sitting there, beside her mother—loyal, curious, and unrelenting.

But I have softened in the knowledge that becoming isn’t so much about holding on too tightly as it is gently letting go.

To evolve is to make an agreement with life itself, allowing it to sweep us to our destiny,
carrying with us all the little pieces of what we know tucked inside our loving arms, waiting for just the right moment to be shared. 

This, is the moment.

About The Photo—

My dear friend asked me recently if there is anything I regret. I had a difficult time finding an answer until I began searching for a picture of my mama and me. This one is precious for many reasons, mostly because it’s one of the few in my adult life that captured the two of us together. This is not a story of my mama, although she was a queen. It’s not even about my relationship with her, though I loved her fiercely until the very end.

This is a story about who I am. The evolution of a life that has brought me to this day, and to a purpose I could have never foreseen.