If you had told me on Monday that I would be writing this on a Thursday while sitting in my mom's laundry room in Florida, I maybe would've believed you? It's a hard maybe. After logging off of a zoom call at work, my dad texted me from a taxi saying he was flying down to Florida, my mom had collapsed in her home and was in the ER. Minutes later my sister and I were on the phone scrambling to find a flight and rental car. It's been a chaotic few days and my mom almost lost her life. We are so lucky she is still with us. I don't have much else to write here, other than the cliché "hug the ones you love" but even that doesn't feel like the right thing to say. With a constant stream of bad news over the past few years, it feels like I have truly been desensitized to horrific stories and bad things happening, and I began to worry that nothing would make me feel anything again. I feel so conflicted with keeping up with current events to know what's going on and feeling horrible about it OR staying off my devices and living in blind ignorance to the suffering of the world and and neither feel like the right thing to do, especially in these times. Yesterday, in the midst of at all, my boyfriend called to let me know that a close family member of his had suffered a heart attack and he was dropping everything to go out east to Long Island to be with his family. It was then that I lost it and sobbed. Although relieved that I could still feel human emotion, it felt like way too much to handle, like I feel nothing or I feel it all. Hours later he called again and asked, "how's your localized catastrophe going?" and I said, "it's going good, how's yours?" So bizarre that we found ourselves at the bedsides of our parental figures 900 miles away from each other. As of tonight, both of those that we love are stable and doing better. My mom came home from the hospital today, and it is such a relief that the biggest thing we are worried about is what kind of take out we will be getting for dinner. Last week, my sister and I were bummed that we couldn't find a time to get together to hang out, and as we were driving out of the Orlando Airport parking lot we laughed about the turn of events. God had heard our prayer and put us together after all?
Also, a family member gifted my mother a faux taxidermy owl and it has been strangely comforting in this time of need.
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