Building The Love Shack

As I promised while doing the Year in Review, that I would tell it all and so here goes. Let’s get rid of the bad stuff so that the next blogs are back to our happy place.

2021 was another tuff year on the Warriors. 2020, The Covid Year, sucked but 2021, If I had to name it, I would call it the Year of Losses.

There were jobs changes due to job loss and downsizing of homes that were no longer needed as the children have grown up and moved away. With high mortgages to be paid and empty nests, family homes were sold.

We collectively lost, a brother, two uncles, a father, two aunts, an adopted family member who had been part of the family for thirty-five years, and a friend.

Heart Disease, Covid, Cancer, and Suicide hit our homes.

And then there are two sick children who are both adults with Mental Health who have left the families struggling with tied hands to do nothing while the children are so ill that they have no idea that they are ill.

We have learned that the law to protect Mental Health Patients means “the right to be unwell”. Which in reality means watching your family member lose their whole lives and you just stand there and do nothing except scream in silence from the pain.

Our list continued with a couple of surgeries, the loss of a beloved fur baby, and news of other close friends being seriously ill.

We also had some news on my medical condition. After much testing and a fluke incident, it has been determined that I do not have Fibromyalgia. Instead, I have a disease called Connective Tissue Disease which we can now add on to my nine other auto-immune diseases.

The word specialist is my every doctor’s name. I’m still learning about this disease and am pretty neutral about my feelings on it as at the time I don’t understand a lot of it. I’m sure one of the many doctors will make me understand what I have and what we do next if anything at all.

The best I understand is, it’s a rare genetic auto-immune disease that probably caused all the other ones. And I have probably had it most of my life and apparently, I’m doing very well with it. Or so I have heard. And so forward we go and as I said to Husband when we got the name, it changes nothing. It’s just a name and it may give us a different treatment plan when treatment is needed.

Through all of the losses, somehow, we found our way through. Somehow the Warriors kept pulling together and in our own little made family, we keep giving the love that is needed to survive in a world that had much sadness in it.

Somehow those days in the garden, dinners on the deck, and the fireside secrets and shares, keep this little family going even when the year was filled with loss and tears.

What the Love Shack gave us the most this year was a place to escape. A place to share and a place to breathe when the world felt heavy. And a place to arrive and dump it off into caring ears.

So at the Love Shack and for our little family of Warriors, the good again did overshine the bad. Our Lady again gave us the gift of having the place to do that and a found family to just listen when nothing else could be done.

And again… We thank Our Lady, The Love Shack.