Miracles

Forgive this very personal blog, but I feel I owe it to some of you.

For long-time readers, you can go back to December of 2009. If you want to read the post, here is the link, but the short version is I held my goddaughter as she died. It was, to that moment, perhaps the hardest thing I ever had to do. I can barely bury the family goldfish (alas, the Fish Called Wanda passed away this week and is buried in my garden). Holding a child as she died was beyond what I thought I could handle as a mother and a human being. For her family, it was beyond words. And if you want to know about the testament of people being still good and decent, many of you--yes, you my readers--from around the GLOBE, including five countries and all over the U.S.--paid for her burial and for me to get power turned on for her family and food on their table, as they had not worked since she took ill. Every day, PayPal would tell me someone had sent money, or cards would arrive. One man met me here in Richmond and gave me food cards and presents for the holidays for the other children. People still are good and kind and decent, and I really have to say it helped my own heart at a time when I thought the tears would just not stop. It helped her family in real and tangible ways.

In the ways of the Universe, last year was one of those, world-will-not-let-up years. I had a surgery, I came out of remission, I was bullied, I was treated with unkindness in ways I did not think possible, I was diagnosed with a new illness (long story, not really ready to share). It just . . . never . . . let . . . up. The kind of year you look at the sky and say, "Any time you want to cut me a break, feel free."

And today . . . that little miracle was born. He is the new addition to my beloved adopted family. He arrived healthy and he and his family are doing well.

Of all things, I decided to post a quote from a Christian theologian, for no other reason than his sentiment echoes mine.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. ~ C.S. Lewis

Here's the thing . . . for the last year I have been completely rudderless in the fiercest seas of my life. And it has gotten so bad that I finally abandoned my ship and jumped into the sea, completely alone. And it was there I discovered . . . I can swim.

I share this story--atypical for this blog in how personal it is--because I KNOW some of you are the very people who opened your hearts a year and a half ago, and sent me--a stranger to many of you beyond my novels--money and prayers and cards and emails. You were part of a period of, in the Buddhist expression, "loving-kindness." Strangers sustained me more than real-life people this year, until many of you were not strangers anymore, but my friends.

So that picture? He's a miracle. And I thank those of you who have stopped and lit a candle or said a prayer or offered up a thought. You have no idea what it meant. I will post more pictures tomorrow, I hope. But for now, I welcome Alberto. And I know how sister Guadalupe is looking down on us all from somewhere, and she is smiling.

Bless you all.