It’s been a while.

Long enough that it feels like I should reintroduce myself. I wrote a brief update in my newsletter this week, so I won’t go into every detail. You can read it HERE. But the short version is this: my aunt has been very sick, and our family has been living in, what I’m calling, The Land of Caregiving.

My time has not been my own.

Make no mistake. We are all grateful to show up. We’re talking about one of my favorite people on the planet. There’s nowhere else I would rather be. I’m only offering an explanation as to where I’ve been.

I keep telling people I’m “disassociating.”

Sounds clinical, probably a little dramatic. But what I mean is, I’m doing the next thing in front of me. I’m answering questions, washing dishes, sitting in hospital and rehab rooms while the majority of me is a million miles away. It’s like my mind knows something my heart isn’t ready to hold yet.

Constantly bracing.

How do you fully function inside this type of grief?
The kind where the person you love is here but struggling.
The kind where you are both grateful for the moment and quietly afraid of what the future will bring.
I don’t know how to do that.

What I do know is who she is to me.

She is woven into every single childhood memory – the adult ones, too. There is not one part of my life that Rose has not touched.

She was the baker of the annual Easter Bunny Cake. The owner of the backyard where entire worlds were built out of imagination. She’s been the cheerleader for the big things and the small ones – the person who shows up the same way for both. She was the team mom, the party planner, the culinary goddess, and every other meaningful title you can think of.

The constant.
The gatherer.
The one who made things feel like home.
She was my home for my first few years of life.

And now we sit in quiet rooms, watching her do something impossibly hard.

Writing requires presence, but presence feels like standing too close to something I don’t know how to survive.

So I’ve stepped back a little.

Not because this doesn’t matter. But because she matters more. What I’m learning, whether I want to or not, is that love shows up.

It shows up when it’s inconvenient.
When it’s exhausting.
When it asks more of you than you feel capable of giving.

It shows up and stays.

And that’s what we’re doing right now. We’re showing up. For her. For each other.

The writing will come back. But this. This is where I’m meant to be.

*Disclaimer* I threw in the part about washing dishes because it sounded good. We’re not washing dishes. We’re completely ignoring our domestic duties, which is nothing new, now we just have an excuse.