Now is Always a Before

Coming across this picture has had me thinking about how life is full of so many “before _________” and “after ___________” divisions. Of course, many of those are only clear in hindsight. We don’t typically know when something is going to be a last, or when some unanticipated life-changing event was just on the horizon.

Or sometimes we do sense that. We know that the birth of a child will forever change our lives. There is a definite difference between before becoming a parent vs. after. We expect marriage to be another such transformative event, encompassing many befores and afters. And whether it was expected or not, there is always a marked before and after divide when we lose a loved one.

I recently came across this photo and it transported me back to the morning of August 31, 2020. After waking in the dark and driving up to the University of Utah hospital as the sun was rising, Kenny had just been dropped off to be admitted for the series of risky and life-saving surgeries needed to remove the tumor that had broken his spine (and despite some loss of sensation and pain, he still drove that morning because he knew that driving more than 30 minutes at a time caused me pain, and I would need to do the drive back on my own). With strict Covid restrictions in place, I was not allowed to come inside with him at all.

The past three days had been such a flurry of preparations, of being suddenly thrust into this world of cancer (although we didn’t yet know for sure if the tumor was malignant, signs pointed toward that likelihood), of pain and numbness increasing alarmingly fast, of already needing to manage some unwanted side effects from strong medications, of trying to answer children’s and friends’ and family members’ questions when we didn’t know the answers ourselves, of trying to think of what things we should consider or set up if the unthinkable happened and Kendall didn’t come home (or was paralyzed, or, or, or…), of figuring out ways to take one more family photo in that “before” space pre-surgery while still adhering to the isolation requirements necessary for Kendall to be admitted to the hospital, and on and on. We knew we were living in a place of before. The after was still a large unknown, but we knew that a lot of things were going to undoubtedly change for our family.

I remember sitting there bathed in that early morning light, alone in the car, the silence feeling almost oppressive, an anticipated week separated from Kenny already feeling long. I intentionally took a deep breath and said a quick prayer asking for peace and strength. There were plenty of fearful thoughts that had been floating through my head: concerns that I couldn’t be there with him, worry of how we were going to pay for what would surely be monumental medical bills (so glad I had no idea on this one), wondering how I was going to help my children with their own fears if I was anxious myself, even thinking ahead to the fact that we would not be able to stay in our home if Kenny became paralyzed or disabled in any way (split levels are really not conducive to that, after all). So it felt like a brave step to decide I was going to smile instead of giving in to tears.

That certainly was very much a before/after moment for me and my family. There have been many over the two and a half years that have come since. So many ways I’ve needed to move well outside my comfort zone to handle situations I could never have previously imagined. I think it can sometimes be easy to fall into a trap of thinking of those “before” times of life as somehow better. To ruminate on how things were surely easier before someone died, or children were forced to grow up too quickly, before something traumatic happened, before an illness or injury brought loss of ability, etc.

But is that really fair? No one ever knows what is truly in store for them. There will be hard experiences still coming, things that will stretch us in painful ways and cause us to change (hopefully for the better). There are also many wonderful experiences still to come. Rather than live in a constant state of “I may never have things this good again,” or “Things can, and likely will, always get worse,” what if we considered the present as more of a “not yet” time? There are things that I have not yet learned, people I have not yet met, experiences I have not yet had that will continue to shape me. It’s all a journey, right, with an ultimate eternal destination. Still, I wonder what I will think when, years from now, I reflect back on my present now. What things are still in store for my life?