Happy New Year, Happy New Decade, Happy New Life!

Just before Christmas someone asked me, "What are you most looking forward to in 2020?"  Without missing a beat I replied, "Saying good-bye to 2019."

Some good-byes are heart-wrenching and agonizingly painful.  Some are healing and cathartic.  There should be different words for the different layers of good-bye.  On second thought, I guess there are.  I should have said, "Saying good riddance to 2019."

But that's not even quite right.  Good things happened in 2019.  Many good things happened in 2019.  I filled a personalized calendar for 2020 with hundreds of those fantastic memories, and I will enjoy reliving every one of them as the pages of the year turn.

But 2019 is attached to three words that weigh it down with a ferocity that prevents the buoyancy of those good memories from claiming the year as their own.  Meniscus.  Cancer.  Pedophilia.

The meniscus might not seem in good company with two powerhouse words like Cancer and Pedophilia; but, oddly enough, its diagnosis unleashed some of the year's most powerful sobs...of joy!.?  Since college, my left knee has periodically reminded me that basketball exacts a price.  In the 2010s, it began screaming at me that falling on ice exacts a higher price.  And in 2019, it went on strike and made its case known 24-hours a day, refusing to fully bend or straighten, or walk down stairs or inclines, shrieking its displeasure with the persistence of a toddler.  It's not like it had been ignored.  It was pampered with multiple physical therapists, an orthopedic surgeon, an MRI, and more therapy, ten years of it.  Everyone, except the MRI, saying meniscus.  Come to find out, the MRI in 2012 had agreed with those experts but someone reading it did not.  So, I sat in my vehicle sobbing last Tuesday as the words "torn meniscus" confirmed that I wasn't crazy and gave me hope that there could be an end to the pain and immobility.  Even so, it was pain I had resigned myself to bear and live with.  In 2020, I have hope that I may not have to.

Cancer was a bigger, bully of a word.  I expected it to envelope my world and shut me off from my normalcy, ushering me into an unrecognizable and dark hall of gloom.  But that's not what cancer did to me.  Instead, it took me into a world of the Zootopia sloths.  Everything moved in slow motion.  A lump on my neck in early May, an ultrasound in late May, a biopsy in late June, an all-clear diagnosis  in early July, a wait-a-minute-something-looks-fishy addendum in late July, all the while hearing "you can just wait and repeat the test in 6 months".  I was the rabbit pushing for each next step as the cancer world moved in slow motion imperceivably turning the pages of the daily calendar.  Surgery to remove half of my thyroid in late August.  Finally, the word cancer in September.  Oh, and by the way, it was angio-invasive (entered the blood stream), but just a little bit.  It sounded like, "we dropped some cow manure in your scrambled eggs, but just a little bit."  New doctor, new city, cancer specialists, another surgery, hormone replacements, tired, tired, tired.  The slow motion and the time dragging and the tired and the recovery were the trials.  The Cancer felt safe, it was in God's hands.  The suffering came from all of the other side effects.  But, those effects promise to subside, and the cancer numbers, which are in check, will be something we slothfully monitor for the rest of my days.  My "follicular, angio-invasive thyroid cancer" is something I can bear and am resigned to live with.  2020 gives me hope for complete eradication of the hints of straggling cells.

But then, as the year drew to a close, Pedophilia reared its most ugly head.  I was introduced to this beast at the too-young age of 10, brought to me by one to whom I owed my very existence and who should have been protecting me from the very thing with which he tormented me.  1972 was a decade or so short of  public awareness and stranger-danger education.  Mine was no stranger, only danger.  My prepubescent mind did what it could to sort out the confusion by compartmentalizing it in the "well, that part of childhood really stinks" and moved on.  By the time I understood that was the wrong compartment, the danger was past and my silence seemed to be all that remained.  Tragically, the danger wasn't past.  Thankfully, braver-and-more-informed-than-me, young souls found their voices, spoke up, and pointed fingers.  He served his first sentence in 1987.  Thirty-three years later our family history is littered with lies, incarcerations, divorce, broken promises, deceptions, years of intentional separation, accusations, greed, and pain, As it is prone to do, history repeated itself, playing the worn out tune of destruction, more of the same.  But something seemed different.  We thought a corner had been turned and remorse seemed real  as his 70th birthday was spent behind bars.  We thought it truly was a catalyst to a new beginning.  Wishful thinking?  We began to build new memories and attempted to find some right in the wreckage of all the wrong.  It felt like we were moving, creeping sometimes, in the right direction.  And then it was Christmastime, 2019.  Christmas shouldn't be spent hoping your father's cancer diagnosis is bad enough to give him a very short life expectancy because the pain of more hurt to another child (NOTE--no relation to us) just feels like too much to bear.  But that's what the last days of 2019 held for us, my three siblings and me, more of the same.  More of the dreaded, unrelenting same. For me, however, this time, finally, there was a difference.  Unknowingly, there had been a power he held over me that kept me silent on certain levels.  It's not that I didn't talk about it, I did.  I faced it, I moved on from it.  I even forgave it.  But, calling the police to report the Pedophile felt like I was finally exercising power over the perpetrator, over the evil monster of criminality against innocence.  I was finally doing what was right to protect others from his narcissistic cruelty.  That phone call changed me.  It wasn't vindictive or vengeful.  It was responsible. Pedophilia is something I can not bear and I refuse to live with it.  This is worth fighting against.  2020 brings hope that he is stopped and that our story empowers someone else to use their voice to stop an injustice.

So, good riddance to those parts of the last year and decade.  I'm glad to have it in my rear-view mirror.  But thanks be to the God of heaven and earth who has promised me that those trials will indeed become fertilizer for my soul.  Dung has it uses, not in our eggs, but given time, it will decompose and bring nourishment and strength to living things, to MY life.  I'm already experiencing the upside of some of the downsides and look forward to more life coming from the dung.  I hope in the Lord of Hope who has suffered all things that he might comfort me.  2020 gives me hope that His work is not done and that, even out of the dung, He can bring New Life!

Happy New Year!!