All the major news outlets agree – America has entered a third wave of the coronavirus pandemic. With Thanksgiving just around the corner families are trying to decide with whom they should celebrate the holiday and how to make lemonade out of their lemons. It isn’t easy to have a positive outlook with so much bad news hitting 
us every day, but there are peoplewho manage to do just that. They find the “silver lining and the half full glass”. It is so very hard to do that now, but I can recall another difficult time when I was very sad and anxious, but eventually managed to find a way to view my glass as half full. It was when Steven got his first wheelchair.
Although the wheelchair definitely made our day-to-day life easier, it was a symbol of his growing disability. It caused the old emotional wound that started with Steven’s diagnosis of MS to reopen, and so once again I had to confront my fears about disability and our future, my sadness and my pain, and Steven had to confront his as well.
Shortly after I took a few days of respite and went to the beach where I wrote a poem that is included in my book: “It Doesn’t Have to be This Hard”. Here is an excerpt:
While at the beach sitting on the sand and soaking up the warm rays of the sun, alone with my thoughts and feeling, I wrote a poem that was inspired by of all things, a beach chair. The poem erupted out of my brain in only a few minutes, and poured onto the writing pad that was propped up against my thighs. It was a very dark poem, reflecting all the painful emotions the purchase of the wheelchair engendered. It expressed my fears and my anger. It was the visible representation of the pain that I held inside. It was a poem written by a woman who definitely saw her glass as half empty. The sun was shining. I was enjoying a respite, and I decided to try and think about Steven’s need for the wheelchair in a different way. I ripped up the first poem and began again. The poem that came from my inner core the second time around was more upbeat. It looked at the doors that the wheelchair opened for Steven and me, not the ones that it had closed.
It sits there at the crest of the beach, on the rise just before the sand dips towards the water’s edge. A lone beach chair,
seemingly abandoned.
It’s a jaunty chair with a yellow striped canvas seat and sailboats floating on its blue and yellow back support.
It lists just a bit to the left, almost rakishly, as it nestles in the sand, surveying the sea.
It is a chair made just for sitting, and sitting on the sand at that. It has no legs to get in the way of stretching out, relaxing, and letting the sun seep into your bones and warm your soul.
It is so unlike another chair I know, a black chair with wheels, a chair that does not survey the vastness of the ocean with a jaunty air, but rather a chair that defines a narrower kingdom.
And yet, I think this other chair is a happier chair than the one that sits and stares out to sea, for it is a chair with wheels that take the place of legs no longer able to propel their owner forth.
This other chair is not made for sitting and looking at the world. It is a chair built for exploring, for meeting life face to face and tasting of its spirit.
Perhaps this chair should have a seat of yellow and white stripes, and a back support adorned with sailboats.
A far better statement of its adventurous and joyous possibilities.
Nothing had changed in the hour between the time I wrote the first poem and the time I wrote the second one, nothing except my attitude. And yet that was everything.