IN our Prayers, Thoughts Come!

2011 South Africa

This is my family. The family that is trying to be resilient. On this pic we had no worries, we were all well.

I am trying my best to keep us from unraveling, but it is difficult. At times I don't know what to do... my husband their father is battling all the complications from the stroke. None of us are used to navigating life without Reggie being in the center imparting his wisdom.

What we are experiencing we could have never prepared for. Each day I rise I look for the good, the light in the dim situation. I try to make sense of everything.

I can't run away. This is my reality." - Gervel Jones-Sampson 

... You can't.

I have been following the story of a man and his wife, Gervel Jones-Sampson, for a little while, as the husband struggles with a major health crisis. His wife is telling the story and her telling is told different because she is wife and mother caring for her heart as she cares for the body and heart of her husband wrestling within his mortality, their children in the struggles of being adult children, the next generation. There is a condition, a unique awareness Creatress placed within wives to be Sacred women. It is evidenced in the way wives love their men in hard situations. Assembled with respect for the changing terrain of loving her husband this type of wife understands the complexity of love. Encircled by the challenge to loving a husband is the glyph, the Tree of Life.

Losing my parents over the slow pace of the years between first Mommy and then Daddy leaving this life in pain, lent eyes to me I did not have, and a storytelling I didn't have the capacity for previously. 

I told Gervel these words:

"I pain thinking of your family story this present date. There are similarities to my family story. As encouragement, the changes each day brings, in retrospect, may reveal core relationships between events from the family's distant past and recent past that prepared the family unit for this trail. It is an odd comfort how our lives prepare us, and distance us at the same time. Either view links us to our ancestral lines bridging us to the long ago, and the long away. It is why we live and we live deep in the engagement that brought us here.

None of us (my brothers and sister) fathomed how we were made ready for our parent's illnesses. It began when they began caring for us as babes, and children. We paid attention and learned how to care for them. Mirrors. The mirrors before us and them reflected the light playing with the shadows playing along the paths of our living. . .

My prayers and appreciation for your bewilderment, your love for each other and the bonds being strengthened linking with all Life pulling your family together!"

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

January 18, 2018