When I started this blog, and chose the name, I knew I wanted to focus on the good things. I was at a point in my life where I felt like I was surrounded by blessings, and where James and I were working to create our dream home and property. That isn’t to say every day was unicorns and rainbows, but just to say that I didn’t have to look much further than the garden, the flower beds, our animals, our time on the porch or our beautiful home to find abundant blessings.

I struggle to write lately because I’m struggling to find the blessings.

Yesterday, my beloved brought me lunch at school. He likes to do that, and has many times over the years, but he had been working longer hours than usual and now, since he “retired,” he hasn’t always felt up to the task, but yesterday he mentioned it as I left for work and sure enough, just about the time my students headed to lunch, there he stood in my classroom doorway.

We shared the Caesar salad that he brought as well as the handful of fresh strawberries – the first – from our garden that he had picked that morning. We sat at the table Dad had made me while we ate, juxtaposed kitty-corner to each other in a way we hadn’t been seated in a while. While he spoke, I noticed a spot just under his right ear, near the scars of his surgery from last year, and I reached my hand up to touch the spot. “I know,” he said quietly, acknowledging the lump, “I noticed it two days ago. I just didn’t want to say anything.”

A new one. Another one. A visible one. These fucking tumors.

I steeled myself against the tears. I was in my classroom, after all, and the kids would be returning in a few short minutes. But we both sat there, feeling every ounce of discouragement and frustration we had been fighting against. Optimism is our general rule of thumb, but it’s so hard when all signs keep pointing us in the opposite direction.

Today, seemed like a good day. A good day in the sense that he texted me a picture of the “extra protein” smoothie he made himself this morning. A good day in that he suggested I meet him “at the garden” when I got home from school – our new relaxing spot, with a different vantage point than the porch. A good day in that even as I drove home and texted him that I had cold things and I would have to stop at the house, he said he had a cooler at the garden, which meant he had snacks and probably a glass of wine ready for me. But, when I pulled up at the garden, just moments later, he wasn’t sitting in his Adirondack chair waiting. He was on his knees, under the grape vines, vomiting. It had come on that suddenly, that unexpectedly.

To say I feel helpless doesn’t even scratch the surface. To say I am angry or livid or frustrated or so incredibly sad can’t even begin to describe what it is I feel. There just aren’t words profound or deep or vivid enough to convey the gut-wrenching emotions I feel when I see him like that.

Today, I sat at a ball game with over a hundred fourth grade kids watching some of their faces and cheeks turn pink in the sun from lack of sunscreen (despite all our notes and suggestions). Today, I had colleagues shrug off the notion of sunscreen for the event because “they tan.” Today, I watched my husband kneeling in the goddamn weeds sick to his stomach from tumors that came from the very same sun that warmed my face today (heavily protected by 70 spf and a hat). Today I cried the entire drive to and from and during a grocery run to find him popsicles because that’s the only thing that even sounds good to him and the only thing he was brave enough to try after being sick again.

If there are blessings here, I don’t know where they are. If there is some lesson I am supposed to be learning or some amount of gratitude I didn’t express enough of before, or if there is some “greater meaning” I’ll be damned if I know it or can find it.

I can lay my hand on my husband’s body and feel the tumors beneath my fingers. And it feels nothing short of evil.