What I’m most grateful for this Thanksgiving is that I am finally regaining my health, I’m able to breathe again, and I’m reemerging into life.

It’s been a very challenging six months. Shortly after my book launched in May, I grew very ill, and spent the rest of the summer and fall visiting doctors, getting scanned, poked, and prodded, and occupying hours in emergency rooms. Everything I’d planned to do to get my book out into the world including book events, podcasts, being active on social media, and writing regular blogs fell by the wayside as I had to shift my focus to getting well.

This time of ill health has been a very introspective and revelatory time for me. I’ve learned a lot about myself, about the grace that comes in surrender, and about letting go of attachments to how I envisioned things would be, so I could accept the truth of how things are. And this includes another ring around the spiral of grief, followed by the promise of emergence into joy.

As a soul friend on whom I rely for counsel said in one of our chats over the summer, “You’ve grieved for the mother you wanted and finally experienced at the end of her life. Now perhaps you’re grieving for the one you needed when you were a child but didn’t have?” What I realized in that conversation is that I needed to address the other, more difficult side of my grief, in order to truly heal, and that’s been my work this summer. It is not lost to me why my illness set up camp deep in the fissures of my lower lungs, the life force that enables us to deeply inhale and feel fully alive.

In the midst of the difficult days of so many unknowns, when self-deprecation, doubt, and despair arose, I lived with these questions…What made think I could be a writer? Should I just give up on that dream? What if I never got well and had to permanently retreat from the active life I’d lived? What if I had cancer, my days were numbered, and I hadn’t made the contributions to the world I’d planned? What if my coaching career was over and I had to retire early? What if all our plans and dreams for traveling the world had to be laid to rest?

In the midst of the darkness, blessings unexpectedly arrived…A gold Mom’s Choice and a 2023 Best Book Award for Catch Me When I Fall. A note from a dear reader saying, “I am so grateful our lives intersected this summer at the point in my own grieving process when my heart needed to hear your raw and vulnerable words.” Joyful moments with our ten and eleven-year-old niece and nephew this summer and fall. Snuggling with Gracie, our rescue puppy, feeling her heart entrain with mine as I lay on the couch, relying on the medicine in the nebulizer to breathe. And when I was at my lowest ebb, the visitations in my dreams from our beloved Bella, our fifteen-year-old lab who died a week before my book launch, encouraging me to trust that I would get better. And finally now, the end of the drought of words that have eluded me for several months, my lifeline to the world.

This Thanksgiving, I’m grateful for so many things…for finally learning that trying to push through difficulties through sheer force of will is no longer a good strategy for me or my health; that I’d prefer to be thriving instead of grieving; that the people we love, rather than our achievements, are what matter most; that joy can follow sorrow, and peace, displace pain when I surrender to love and maintain hope, no matter how dark the hour.

As fall turns to winter, I wish you and yours a beautiful Thanksgiving. I look forward to connecting again in December.

Love and Blessings,

Donna