Hello and much howdy, Reader,
We are going to be okay. I want to begin there, because for the last several weeks our lives have felt as though the floorboards beneath us suddenly gave way, and everything we thought was solid had to be rebuilt in midair.
Many of you have noticed my silence. The unanswered messages. The pause in newsletters. The strange quiet from someone who is usually sharing stories, beauty, movement, plans. I wanted to finally tell you why.
As many of you know, my husband and I had been preparing for a huge chapter change. We sold our home and planned a long journey across America to visit family and dear friends before eventually crossing the Atlantic and beginning a new life in Scotland. There was excitement, exhaustion, nostalgia. Boxes already shipped. Last dinners in familiar places with dear, dear friends. The beautiful ache that comes with saying goodbye to one life before another begins.
And then, just a day or two before we closed on our house, we found out my husband’s cancer had returned.
Everything stopped.
What had been a grand journey suddenly became hospital corridors, scans, phone calls, specialists, logistics, fear. We had already sold our home, and overnight we found ourselves suspended in a strange in-between place. Technically homeless. Emotionally untethered. Unable to leave. Unable to plan. Just waiting for answers.
We did manage to spend a few beautiful days in Oakland before turning back for more tests and phone calls from doctors.
My husband ultimately had a kidney removed. Doctors also discovered cancer cells in his sacrum, which required three rounds of radiation. The scars! The pain! The long road to healing! Sheeeeeesh!
There are moments in life that divide time into before and after. This has been one of them. And yet, strangely, it has also been beautiful.
Not beautiful in the glossy or performative way people sometimes mean when they try to make suffering sound poetic. I mean beautiful in the old-world sense. The Brontë kind. The kind born from fierce love, long conversations in dim kitchens, borrowed bedrooms, exhausted laughter late at night, hands reaching out without needing to be asked.
Friends have opened their homes to us. Truly opened them. We have been carried by kindness in ways I will never forget for the rest of my life.
What has struck me even more deeply is how many people around us are standing at similar thresholds right now. Two of my dearest friends are also in enormous seasons of change, selling homes, caregiving for family members coming out of surgery, holding together fragile worlds while quietly grieving versions of life that no longer exist. It feels as though so many of us are wandering through this strange passage at once, shedding skins we never intended to outgrow.
There has been sorrow here, yes. Shock. Fatigue. Fear.
But there has also been an intimacy with life that is hard to explain unless you have lived through something like this. The way ordinary moments suddenly glow. The way friendships deepen. The way love strips itself down to its truest form.
We needed privacy for a while. We needed time to absorb the shock, to make decisions, to care for each other, and simply to breathe inside it all. I hope you can understand the silence now.
As for what comes next, we are taking it one step at a time. Of course Scotland is still the plan. Adventure still lives in us. Hope still lives in us. Perhaps even more fiercely now than before. Just need the go ahead for travel with one less kidney! We should know next week.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for every message, prayer, thought, and kindness sent our way, even when I could not answer.
And thank you, most of all, for reminding me that even in the most uncertain chapters, people are capable of extraordinary love.
We are going to be okay.
