Regardless of how cautiously we plan out our route and watch out for potholes, life will always throw in a few painful detours. Your body can betray you. Your loved ones can walk away. Your mind can begin to forget. At any time, your careful designs can crash into unfair and painful realities.
In those times, just surviving can consume all of your energy; grasping that tiny strand of hope as you stumble through the dark toward a revised life that you didn’t necessarily choose.
These are the moments that test your character. It is when you are at your worst that your choices are most impactful.
Excerpt from “When I Died”
By Emma Lou Thayne
So if I now am at a distance
and more and more
connected to night
and wake up with a closed smile
that takes up my wrinkles
it is that I am occupied:
by the light that tells me
where I have been and will go and
listens with me in the ringing
and rejoicing of having had the time.
Emma Lou Thayne is a respected Utah author. This poem was published in Things Happen: Poems of Survival, one of her many uplifting and insightful books.