We had a great Thanksgiving at our house last week with a traditional meal prepared by Mary Elizabeth’s mother, with a lot of help from our friend Cathy.  All together, we were 16 at table, including the kids, who had a great time.

In what might become a Thanksgiving tradition, our friends Scott and Chary came with their son Luis, who helped Clark assemble a rocket for a launch later that day – memorializing no doubt the pilgrim’s rocket launch from Plymouth Rock.  I suggested, unhelpfully that they paint a turkey on the rocket.  Unfortunately, the afternoon rain scrubbed the launch, which was postponed until the weekend and went off without a hitch (well actually we lost the rocket on the wind, but don’t tell anybody).

As we continue counting down to December 5^th and the anniversary of Mary Elizabeth’s stroke, we are naturally becoming reflective about the last year, and thinking a lot about how far we’ve come and how far we have to go.

Both Mary Elizabeth and I are pretty results-oriented, and take pride in our accomplishments – both professional and personal.  With three graduate degrees between us (Mary Elizabeth has two and I, slacker, have only one), we’ve been lucky enough to have pretty good jobs, and have built a life together with which we are content and for which we are grateful.  Any setbacks we’ve faced over the years (mostly career-related) have been in retrospect pretty minor and with perseverance, overcome.

So with the ability to contribute to our success and control our destinies, we’ve always felt pretty free to dream and plan for the future.  Some dreams were major and involved things like living abroad, starting a business, or doing a major renovation of our charming but decrepit 200-year old house.  Others were more recreational like taking up scuba diving again, or getting serious about our Herreshoff-designed sailboat, Jubilate.  And some were perfectly ordinary things like vacationing in the Caribbean and walking down a moonlit beach.

A lot of our last year has been spent in the thrall of things we can’t control – most of which are related to Mary Elizabeth’s health and ongoing care.  And that lack of control is discomforting, and at times frustrating.  So one of the biggest and hardest challenges we’ve faced this year is learning how to accept – with grace – what has happened to us, and the new direction our lives will likely take.

And that’s hard for people like us.  It feels a little bit like surrender, and I personally continue to feel such feelings of loss, even though I know that we have gained so much while on this journey.

I guess what’s making this bearable for us is that we are relying on our faith to keep our hope alive.  And when I say hope, I’m not referring to an idealistic or unrealistic notion that our lives will return to the way they were before.  It’s more of a philosophical hope that at some point we’ll really understand what’s happened to us, and through accepting it will in some way appreciate it (whatever it may be!).

I just read an email we received in January from Paul – a college friend of Mary Elizabeth’s – who sent us words of warmth, encouragement and gratitude.  We didn’t know at the time that he was terminally ill and only found out last week that he had died at the end of October, leaving behind two daughters – 5 and 10 years old.  He lived a public life, advocating for those with disabilities and taught a lot of people about living with dignity and grace. We are grateful to have been touched by his life.

I don’t know if this makes sense – I feel like I’m rambling a bit – but that’s what’s been going through my mind this week.