I Do Not Live There

Compassionate care from ICU nurse, Mike, just after my dad had been placed on life support.

Tears are leaking out of my eyes again.

This doesn’t happen very often anymore.

For that, I am thankful.

Memories from this time last year arrive without asking.

Hospital rooms.

Fear.

Confusion.

A text that ended with,

“How about tomorrow?”

A medivac flight.

The place that had once been my solace and comfort saying

I was no longer welcome. As if I had done something wrong.

As if he hadn't spent the entire time we were together lying to me.

New hospital rooms.

An ambulance ride.

My dad saying,

“If you don’t get out, I am going to die.”

Lucidity and presence.

Confusion and disappearance.

Heartache and aloneness

in my greatest time of need.

Again.

So much hurt.

So much fear.

So much responsibility.

So much abandonment.

All of it tucked neatly inside me

so I could show up and function

every single day.

There are no real words for what February, March, and April were like last year.

Only this:

It was the beauty and the brutality of a life coming to its end.

And the devastation of learning that I had chosen to love and trust a man who could speak intimacy and safety fluently — heart to heart, skin to skin —

and yet be unimaginably deceitful, selfish and cruel underneath it all.

That season carved something into me.

Not fragility.

But depth. Deeper than I have known before.

There is a well inside me.

Not one I fall into.

Not one I carry around like a wound.

It simply exists —

deep,

quiet,

holding what it holds.

I can feel it when the tears come.

But I do not live there.

I visit.

I stand at the edge,

carefully and gently looking in.

Recognizing what is there—

the fear,

the responsibility,

the abandonment,

the love,

the loss.

All of it part of my story.

None of it steering my life.

I sit with it.

I honor it.

I let it know it is seen.

And then, when I am ready,

I turn and walk back into my day.

Not because it disappears.

Not because it no longer matters.

But because I am not defined by what I endured.

The well is deep.

And so am I,

In the most incredible ways.