How does anyone navigate healing? When you are sent home after surgery there is a feeling that you have been set adrift upon unknown waters. As I mentioned in my last few posts I am eternally grateful for the visiting nurse and the many check-ins from the hospital, but still, you are generally left wondering if you are doing what you should in order to fully return to your productive self. Now that I am just about one month on my recovery journey, I have discovered a few helpful tips, which I hope will help anyone who is convalescing after surgery or is on the road back from an injury, and these I will share.
The Healing Power of Flowers
It is quite easy to “take time to smell the roses” while you convalesce, in fact, it is perhaps the easiest thing to do. Each sweet bouquet that arrived on my doorstep brought more and more easy joy, gracing our home for more days than you might imagine, with stems of pink and yellow and red, all the colors not seen out our windows during this monochromatic season. Of course, with each flower came healing, their power born of beauty and grace, love and hope.
in sickness and in health
Sure health and wealth and party vibes are mostly what I love to remember when I think of my past three decades being married to this one. The pastel sunsets and dance floors, the brimming table with family laughing through the holidays and the nights of crazy merrymaking until we dropped, mostly documented with silly selfies and glam shots but nonetheless all seared into memory. Thanks to social media we can look like the rest of the shiny populous celebrating every coffee or salad in joyful glee. But the real test of this marriage, and I will say yours too, is how you creep through the hard stuff. Together we have buried all four of our parents. Mourned friends who passed too young. Lost our home. Lost jobs. Held our children as they shattered over breakups or disappointments. We have stood united. And fallen apart. Indeed we have for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, forged a solid bond.


