It is shocking to me how quickly we humans can adjust to a new state of normal. About one month and two days ago, our lives got ripped off track like a band-aid that was covering a completely inconceivable wound. This New Normal is not something we ever collectively imagined we could deal with, but yet somehow we cope.
I am utterly captured with how able dad is to accept his current New Normal with such calmness, patience and positivity. I hold my regard for him so high that I need nine billion step ladders and a crane just to say hi. I can only hope that in my life I could have a fraction of his strength of character when faced with fragile uncertainty.
New Normal now has inordinate amounts of hours being spent in a hospital waiting area that is home to some truly suspect art. These might be the least calming images known to man. So we laugh and pretend they don’t exist.
New Normal allows a surprising amount of room for old normal, whatever normal really is… that shit is totally overrated normal is great. And only because it must; life goes on and on in a house with a massive Jim Craig shaped hole. We laugh and smile because laughter is the best medicine, and those green leaves just have to keep getting greener, while tiny two year old nephews drive their friends around, with startling dexterity, in mini Jeeps.
New Normal also involves getting deliriously excited over any sign of life in Jim’s statue still body. This video was taken the day before yesterday, or some previous day that has leaked into this one, they are all quite similar to me. We have not seen any movement again today, but the doctors did say it would be intermittent. It is also not completely on his command as the pathways do need to learn to reconnect. He is not able to ‘feel’ his feet just yet, but apparently that is also a normal sequence of return. He says he is ‘telling his feet to move’ and they certainly were, via delayed reigniting synapses. I suggested he should also try telling his hair to grow back. He laughed.
We are very far from being out of the woods yet, but the foliage is actually not looking quite as thick and unfriendly anymore. These feet were made for dancing that that’s just what they’ll do…