My fact label: I am a “brain surgery survivor”
My fate label: I am “scarred, vision-impaired, weaker in both body and mind”
My faith label: I am “healed, restored, blessed, protected, loved”
My fact label bolsters my faith.
“I would like to think I loved God and valued and appreciated life sufficiently for my first forty years, but there’s nothing like a major health crisis and potentially life-threatening surgery to really put everything in perspective and reaffirm those feelings.”
Dearest Rachel –
You’d had the tumor removed from where it was pressing against your optic nerve in August of 2010. I’m guessing this study was barely a year later, and fresh in your mind. In a way, it defined you at the time…
Much the same way as I’m probably defined in people’s eyes these days as your widower.
For what it’s worth, I think that over time (and of course, the growth of your circle of friends), that particular aspect of your self diminished in importance, both in other people’s eyes – as old friends forgot about that incident, and new friends who knew nothing about it joined us – and in your own, as it became an ever-more distant memory, albeit one with lasting effects, such as the diminished peripheral vision and (oddly) lack of smell. So it didn’t define you forever.
And perhaps I won’t always be defined as having been your widower, either.
You recognized it yourself, when you acknowledged that the nature of your ‘seen’ fact was “temporary, not eternal.”
Indeed it was. I imagine these days you are able to enjoy sights and smells in a way you hadn’t in years, and enjoying every minute of it, from now into eternity. What your ‘facts’ are now, I can only guess.
I can hardly wait to see how they look on you some day.
Letters to Rachel 