Two-thousand one hundred and ninety-four days.  Six years, a milestone for sure.  Tammy is an outlier.  She is beating cancer.  There are no more statistics, No one on earth knows what will happen next.  So what does beating cancer look like.  All of us would love to share a post that Tammy is cancer free, but she is not.  Everyday Tammy makes a decision to beat cancer that day.  Some days she wins, someday’s it’s a tie, and someday no matter how hard she tries she looses.  For two-thousand one-hundred and ninety-four days she has won more than she has lost.  She is beating cancer because she refuses to let it win.  She lives life in spite of cancer.  She is my superhero, my best friend, and the love of my life.

I am dubbing year number six the year of change.  Lots of things have changed in 2017.  For Tammy it has been a tough year.  It all started in December of last year with a tumor on her brain.  Followed by her adrenal glands shutting down from the drugs that she was on for a clinical trial.  They still are not working, but she has a tumor on one of them also.  She developed a bump above her right eye.  She had surgery and removed it.  Win.  One of the tumors in her lungs is deteriorating a rib, which is painful.  If you keep up with her you know that she was having problems with sciatica since February.  After two surgeries almost all of that pain is gone. Win.  In the meantime they found cancer in her femur.  A large pin later and several rounds of radiation and she is up and moving. Win.  They are still radiating her rib, and it is feeling better. Win.  We found out two weeks ago that cancer had come back around her eye,  She is doing more radiation.  As you can see there are a lot of wins.  Has it been easy, no.  Has there been fear, pain, and sadness.  Yes, but she is winning.  It is hard, but nothing worthwhile in life is easy, and the alternative, well, is just unacceptable.

Year number six has brought a lot of change to our family as well.  Tammy has not worked since last December.  Let me rephrase that.  She hasn’t worked at a job.  Between surgeries, chemo, radiation and doctors appointments she stays busy.  Too busy probably, she is exhausted at the end of the day.  For those of you that don’t know, I shut down my excavation business January ninth and started working for a great company as a project manager.  I decided that I was wore out.  I had been trying to fight to many battles at one time.  It has been good for me.  It is different, but it has been good for me to be able to focus on one less thing.  We decided that we needed to downsize and so next month we will be moving.  It is a smaller house with out as much to take care of.  I think we are all looking forward to a change, but like most times of change there will be a part of us that will miss this house with all of its memories.

Like usual I have been putting this particular update off.  Cancer anniversaries are somewhat bittersweet.  I always try to look back at the last year and find the good.  This last year has been tough.  I don’t think I could look you in the eyes and lie to you that it has been anything different.  Like usual though there have been a whole lot of good things too.  There have been four thoughts that have been on my mind throughout 2017.  They have been things that I personally have been working on.  2017 has changed me for sure, hopefully for the better.  I decided to write about them because for me they are profound for me personally.  As I am going through life I am trying to find out who I am and who I want to be.  So far they are the bedrock for my personal life playbook.

Ego

“Woke up today and decided to lose my ego, It never done me no good no how.”  Stugill Simson

I don’t know what the technical definition of ego is.  I define it as our inner selfishness that drives us to do certain things or think a certain way.  I have been trying to lose my ego.  It’s hard.  I have been working on the opposite of selfishness.  Selflessness.  What does that even mean?  I can only explain it through my thoughts over the last year.  I have learned a lot about love in the last year.  Our ego says that I am loving you in a certain way and you are not meeting my expectation, so you don’t love me enough.  Selfishness says that you are not loving me the way I want to be loved, I need more.  Selflessness says you are loving me the best you can right now.  Whether I want to believe it or not you are giving me all you have and that is good enough.  This revelation came to me because I was feeling that I wasn’t being loved enough.  So I had to dig deep within myself.  At the time Tammy was in immense pain all of the time.  I wanted for her to love me more.  My ego said that I do all these things for you and love you so much, why are you not reciprocating?  My selfish ego was driving me away.  I had to dig really deep and find my selflessness.  It told me that she is giving you all that she has.  To be more honest, she was giving me more than she could afford to give me.  I had to realize that her love for me is so true and deep that she is willing to do anything and everything to fight cancer.  She loved me enough that she was willing to be in pain 24 hours a day, not for herself, but to spend more time with me.  She was loving me so much,  but I refused to see it because of my ego.  That day I learned how to be loved.  Before I thought loving was the hard part,  now I realize that being loved can be just as hard.

Adding Value

When we talk about value we tend to think about money or things in general.  My car is valuable, etc.  This year I started to think about value in a different way.  Basically I looked at all of the people around us who have helped in some way.  Lots of people have helped us in lots of different ways.  I had to think about what they actually did for us.  They could have given us money, or done our laundry, or brought us a meal.  We tend to look at things in a very literal sense.   Chicken noodles is just chicken noodles right.  If I think about it literally it is just a meal.  In reality the “Value” is so much more.  When someone brings us a meal it is nourishment for our family, but it is also and hour that I get to spend with the ones I love.  The value is not necessarily in the meal itself.  The value is what is added because I did not have to fix it.

We have thousands of people who add value to our lives on a daily basis.  So my quest is to figure out how I can add value to everyone I meet.  How do I add value to people and not things.  Things have a cost.  People have value.  My goal is to add some kind of value to every person I meet.  It’s hard.  For me to add value I have to put my selfishness aside and listen.  How can I know what is valuable to someone else if all I am thinking about is myself.  I have to be self-less to add value.

Gratitude

We are grateful for what we have.  That is a pretty easy statement to say, right.  We think it, say it, I think most of the time believe it.  I have to tell you though,  when you are so overwhelmed with kindness you start to ask yourself, am I grateful enough?  When I say that any words I can think up don’t do justice to how thankful we are for all of you. I mean it.  We are blown away by the kindness of others.  I finally had to look at gratitude a little harder and ask myself, if I was going to go deeper into gratitude, how would I do it.  The only thing I came up with is to be thankful for what someone else has.  Sounds crazy right.  How is that deeper than being grateful for what I have?  Ego.  Selfishly I am thankful for what I have.  Selflessly I am thankful for what you have.  My ego says that I need and should have that nice car, or a weeks vacation to a beach somewhere.  When I lose my ego I say I am so thankful that you can spend that time on the beach with your family.  Envy can only exist in ego.  Deep gratitude can only exist in selflessness.

Forgiveness

For some reason, I forgive you, are the three hardest words in language to say.  It doesn’t matter what language it is, we have a hard time saying them.  Why?  Hate to bring this up again, ego.  I have been wronged, it is not my fault, you are stupid, you’re ignorant, you just don’t understand.  All these words are words that say I am important and I matter.  Unfortunately they also say I am selfish.  If we truly want to heal our world, our country or even our relationship with our children we have to start tackling our problems selflessly instead of selfishly.  We can start by saying have been wronged, but I FORGIVE YOU.  We do not agree, but I FORGIVE YOU.  We have to send a message that I am important, BUT, you are important too.  A cut can not heal if we keep tearing the stitches out.  Healing begins when we forgive.  Healing ends when we understand why we were forgiven in the first place and accept it.  Then we move forward.

I have no Idea what is going to happen tomorrow or the next day.  It might be a win or it might be a loss.  So every morning I wake up with the tune from Sturgill Simpson in my head.  I am trying to lose my ego.  If I see you tomorrow I will try to find a way to add value to you life.  I am thankful for what I have in life, but just as important I am thankful for you and what you have done with yours.  I forgive you, I forgive you because you are important to me, and you matter.  If you will forgive me I will accept your forgiveness because I know that I am a work in progress.  I am perfectly imperfect and because I recognize that I am willing to change.

Thank you all for once again indulging me by letting me share our story and my ramblings as an armchair philosopher.  We are truly blessed in this life and I believe that our blessings are not in the things that we have or the house that we live in.  Our blessing are counted by the number of people that we consider friends.  We are humbled by the light that you shine on us, and you will forever and always be in our hearts and minds.