In life, we all have a cross to bear.
While these crosses can make you and sometimes even break you, in many cases, they will shape you and become the internal driving force behind what and who you will ultimately become as a human being.
For some, these crosses are obvious and clearly noticeable for all to see the moment we walk out the front door each day. While for others, they are buried deep inside our psyches and invisible to those around them.
In one’s life, there will always be traumatic incidents that fall under this category – the unexpected death of a family member or a friend, the loss of a job, the breakup of a once strong and thriving relationship, or a major health crisis to name just a few. For every ‘cross’ there will
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Uncle Al had married my mother’s aunt and except for a time or two over the years, I had not seen him since I was eight years old. At the funeral, I almost felt like an outsider. While I felt bad about his death, it was more because of his own children (my cousins) and how they were much more deeply affected than I was.
By comparison, in early 2002, when my mother passed, I wept for days afterward. I had sat in a hospital room on-and-off for four days – waiting for a miracle that never came - after she fell, struck her head, and slowly died from an intracranial hemorrhage. It affected me so greatly that even all these years, there is scarcely a day that goes by that I don’t think about her for some reason or another. She was the foundation on which my sisters and I leaned on throughout our tumultuous childhoods and even later into adulthood.
We all know people in our lives that seem to have been unfairly dealt one too many crosses in their lifetimes, while others seem to have survived seemingly unscathed. How many times have we heard of someone else’s misfortune and thought, “He (or she) is such a great person, how come this stuff never seems to happen to the idiots in the