my journey to now

 

the cusps of my life

my therapist asked me to write my own eulogy,

hoping that this exercise would help me to buck up,

that I could then compare all that is positive in my life

with whatever is negative,

at least in terms of my own actions,

in the exercise, I was struck by all the cusps:

how and where I made countless decisions to go this way, or that,

how and where the universe challenged

by opening or closing doors,

by giving or denying possible paths,

it scares me to realize that so much of who I am,

that so much of what I am proud of,

is the result of choices that now seem right to me

but the "me" that made them

could have been paralyzed if I'd realized what was at stake:

relationships, college, career,

child-rearing, finding my own gifts and expressing them,

nothing, no one, is more vital to who I am than Joan,

and our journey to be as one

scares me with what might have instead have happened,

I feel good about my life, 

about my life making a difference for the good,

it scares me to realize that the abyss could have pulled me in,

and instead I blundered through the cusps

and found myself true to hope

and to who I want to be.

by Henry H. Walker

January 22, ‘25