This afternoon, I got to talk to Cousin Bethy. I love her! We don't get to talk often, because we live in different time zones (she's my England cousin), but I sure love it when we do.
I love Beth. I love her British accent. I love that her voice is like an echo of mine, an octave lower. I love to sing with Bethy, because her voice is like low, mellow butter. I love that Bethy's eyes get really green when she cries, because mine do, too. I love that Beth can make me laugh faster than almost anyone I know. I love that we can talk for hours on end and never run out of things to say.
Today, we were talking about how it's the hard stuff that teaches us the life lessons we need to learn. Beth and Gohar have five children, but for the first several years of their marriage, it was just the two of them. She fought the infertility battle for a couple years before she got pregnant with Elly, her oldest. She told me today that the years of trying but not succeeding were really hard, but that they helped her be grateful every time she found out that was pregnant. We talked about how wanting something, but not being able to have it on your own timetable can be so frustrating, and that the flip side of that is that having had to go through the wanting-but-not-having gives us compassion and empathy that we wouldn't (couldn't) have any other way.
I'm so grateful for a cousin who's a friend. I'm grateful that I was able talk to her about what is hard - and what is awesome - in our respective lives. I'm grateful for the reminder that we all have our own battles, and that no one person's trial or battle is more or less important that anyone else's.
I believe that we were all born with a unique skill set. I believe that our personality and our spirit are intertwined and interchangeable. I believe that, on some level, our spirits knew what trials we would face in mortality and that, knowing then those things we can only hope for and have faith in now, we willingly subscribed to them. I know that sometimes there is no other way to learn a lesson than to live through something that's really hard.
I hope that someday I'll be able to look back on the two years in which I fought cancer three times and be able to say what Beth said - that those two years changed me, that they taught me compassion, that they made me better and stronger that I would have been otherwise.
