Last night I lay in bed, and my thoughts bumped into my old blog on a dreamland street.  Barely recognizable, the stories of my past have been sitting there, like forgotten books on a dusty shelf, for years now.  For dozens of months I’ve had nothing to say – no urge from within to spill my guts on an electronic page – but there it was.  That tug, that compulsion to over-share my life to some unknown audience in the vast internet blackness.

And so…

The next chapter begins.

When I left off, I was teetering on the edge of a midlife renewal and irrelevancy.  Thriving in my long-distance running and halfway-decent fitness level, I was happy and decided I had finally settled into this thing called life, which wasn’t nearly as bad as I had once painted it, though far from the perfect story I had imagined for myself.

And then… 

Life does what life does.  It changes.  It swirls.  It smacks you up the side of the head when you least expect it.  And nothing that you thought was real exists at all.  You find it was all a dream and only your thoughts and perceptions made it what it was.  Underneath lies the frightening truth of mortality and the fleetingness of a biological body.  Maybe that’s what this chapter is about – facing the aging process, knowing grief, and accepting that death is a certainty for all of us.   

In 2019, I watched in despair as my mother battled a holiday illness that took her to the hospital and then to a rehab facility where she received therapies and care.  As she recovered, I began to realize that she had left a bit of herself behind and nothing would ever be the same for either of us.