Are you willing to grow and let go?
My story continues today with uprooting and change. I was settling into life at the medical examiners’ office, with my daughter, husband, dogs, and cozy apartment. We had our routines and, while they were not what I envisioned doing for the rest of my life, they were working for now. We had fun too – we would walk around the park in a big pack – all five of us. I was rounding out my fourth year at work and I felt that the trust was strong with the staff of doctors, autopsy technicians, investigators, and anthropologists. Sometimes we argued like siblings but we relied on one another’s strengths and always got the job done. When Hurricane Sandy rocked through New Jersey and New York, we set up cots in the investigators office and camped out until the water receded from the highways. I’ll never forget the scenes we went to that night – there weren’t many because we couldn’t drive anywhere safely – early in the day an elderly couple was watching TV on the second floor in a far inland town in the north of the state. The wife asked her husband to change the channel and, when he jumped up to do it, a huge wind knocked a tree straight through their roof, crushing him. She was fine, barely a scrape on her.
In the morning, we drove around the city looking for any open businesses, anyone who had power. We found one restaurant cooking and bought a carton of eggs and their frying pan. Everyone enjoyed their scrambled eggs, and no one asked where the hot plate came from. The next few weeks of search and rescue and clean up were rough – we responded down to the shore to look through houses with the Office of Emergency Management’s Task Force 1. It was one of the first times I really felt like a part of the “brotherhood,” like a member of the responder community, like my experience was valuable. We didn’t find anyone (I was disappointed but also relived). New York did not fare as well, and we did our best to send love to everyone effected by the storm.
Soon after, my husband accepted his first full time job at Salisbury University on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Dead people are everywhere, so I gladly packed up my things, gave my two weeks, and felt confident that my next medical examiner’s office experience would be a great step in the next direction. I truly believe that everything happens for a reason, but the next six years were a doozy. It’s hard to reflect critically on the time I spent in New York and New Jersey because it’s easy to paint the past with a fuzzy soft brush. I had a fun! A baby and no house! Everything was so easy! That’s nonsense – of course life was hard, and the job wasn’t roses and sunshine. The things I’ve endured, good and bad, all taught me something. If there is a moral to be had in this newsletter, it is that “you are responsible for finding the gift in every moment.” Good, bad, annoying, lovely, stinky, precious, horrible, tragic, loving, patient – all of those things teach us something. If my boss is a pain in the butt, I can learn how to lead in the right way. If I’m doubtful that things will ever change, I can instead find space where I hope things will change and then be that change. What else do you think you could flip around? Are you willing to grow and let go?
Kat
