I lived in a beautiful bubble. A perfect little world. Sure, there’s lots of bad stuff out there. Sure, people are dying, they’re sick, and they have terrible problems. But, I lived in a beautiful perfect bubble: healthy family, four gorgeous children.
Then, my bubble burst. Actually, it didn’t just burst. It exploded into thousands of little shards that cut me, that cut my family, that sliced us open from top to bottom, and that left hundreds of little scars all over us. When Sam was diagnosed with leukemia, he was six years old. Less than two years later, at the age of 8, he died. From the moment my first child was born, I wasn’t the same person. From the moment that my second-born child died, I was irreparably changed again.
Oh, if only I could return to that bubble. If only I could find myself back in the beauty of that perfect existence, floating and bouncing along on the breeze. Of course, I can’t. I’m forever out here, without the bubble. I never could quite imagine how I would live outside of it. Like an astronaut in a suit, like a scuba diver with a shark cage…
I wondered what would happen if my bubble wasn’t there. Would I be able to breathe the air? Would I be able to survive?
Life in the bubble was lovely, and life outside it is not the same. But, I have discovered that without it I can still breathe the air, and I can still move. I can reach out to so many others, all of us in our bubble-less worlds and all of us in it together.
