"This cadence of the sea continues until a violent storm appears, forecast by dark, heavy clouds, and off and on snow squalls. Nor’easters, as these large ocean storms are called in New England, hit the Massachusetts’ coastline a few times a year. The winds build to hurricane proportion and the waves, instead of being gentle and rolling as they are today, grow huge, crashing, destroying, and changing landscapes, eating up old sand dunes, spitting out new ones, sucking cottages into the surf. Then, when their ferociousness dies down, the sea calms and resumes a natural rhythm once more.
Are we so different? We establish a comfortable tempo in our lives
that we take for granted, until something untold happens to disrupt or destroy
it.
How many times had the unexpected occurred in my
life to change the rhythm I’d enjoyed?
And how many times did I return here, to the ocean, to mend a broken
heart, replenish my soul, to fight to recover the rhythm of my life."
New Year's Eve day 2014 changed my life. I sat with my
sister as the doctor pronounced the word that neither of us wanted to
hear - cancer. Four months later, she was dead. In those
sixteen short weeks, I couldn't write, couldn't paint, couldn't focus,
forgot things, and had no concentration. I resorted to working on my
large Victorian doll house that had occupied a corner of an upstairs room for
years, unfinished. Why? As one of my friends said, "it's because you don't have to concentrate on what you're doing." I laid down
copper roof trim, measured and glued shingles on the plywood roof, and wallpapered...
all things that I didn't have to think about; she was correct.
When my sister became bedridden, I needed something for us to do
together, to keep her interest. And then I thought of it, her story; we
could write the children's book that she had always talked about, but never
wrote. I knew the general premise of the story, but I needed to
bring her idea to life, to paint it with words, something she had always
wanted to do, but couldn't. I sat one day at her side and read the first
two pages to her. She smiled and said, "Why didn't you ever do that
as a living? That's so wonderful." She meant writing. I
laughed ... oh how I had tried. She loved what I had written. I had
hoped she would be there to see the finished product, but in the blink of an
eye, she was gone.
These last few weeks following her death, I have filled my hours
with completing the tale. I'm now concentrating on painting the cover and
a very dear friend, a wonderful artist, is working on the illustrations to go
with the story.
Out of all the chaos, pain and sadness of these last few months, have
come a beautiful story and a connection to my sister that still goes on.
I will find a new rhythm for my life, one without my sister.
It won't be easy, but in the end, it was the writing of her tale that carried
me through these dark, sad weeks following her death. I thank her
for that.
Till,
Judi
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