The Imagined Future

 

I wrote this in a blog post concerning Adri in 2007, over 18 years ago. Suffice it to say that history has proven that I was never able to strike that balance successfully despite my best efforts:

"Sometimes it's almost a bit too much for me to take, for she's a thousand miles away and there's very little I can do at the spur of a moment after a frantic phone call. Also, there's really only so much you can do for other people; they really do have to help themselves, especially if that "help" is going to be a permanent, life-changing help and not just a short, temporary antidote. Now I'm sounding like John Galt or something. While I'm all for teaching people to fish, they have to be alive to make use of this skill. It's a fine scary line and I don't know where it is with her sometimes."

 I always saw this future, this outcome, but tried to not let it become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I knew (intellectually) that there is free will and the future is not set, that there were two possible outcomes for her and us, that of course we were not fated to the present we have now.

I'd hope and try to believe this wasn't the reality we'd find ourselves in, and I think if anything I tried harder and with more sense of urgency since I couldn't claim ignorance in some future where she didn't survive. I'd seen it, I would stop it.

When she survived last year, for a New York minute I started to believe we had passed that fork in the timeline and were on the good outcome. I couldn't believe our good fortune to having beaten the odds that made me look like a pessimistic worry wart for nothing, but I was glad to be wrong.

But that optimistic outlook was short-lived.

I don't want to make it seem I was resigned to this, because I was *not*. But, there was the little dark raincloud that I'd *try* to ignore or thwart inside of me.

I'll say this, though: I've reacted a lot better than my future imagined self did with this outcome. I'm guessing it's the boys who have prevented that, at least. And Cindy. And maybe we're stronger than we think.

And maybe I'd had years to prepare myself.