The Waiting Room
Week 66 – Ending July 26, 2026
There are weeks that build mountains.
There are weeks that teach rivers.
And then there are weeks that ask only one thing of us:
Can you remain yourself while you wait?
This week was that week.
It began with a poem that arrived before I fully understood why it needed to be written.
The Most Awful Waiting Room
A poem about ongoing, impending, immense grief.
Cold floors and florescent lights
sometimes too dim,
yet somehow always overly bright.
Uncomfortable chairs wedged into corners
alongside outdated magazines written in
unknown languages.
Shifting and squirming and quietly watching
the dark door that fills an entire wall.
Waiting for an atrocious monster to
break it down and take me away.
At the time, I believed I was writing about grief.
Looking back now, I realize I was writing about anticipation.
The strange place where life continues, yet every room contains an unseen door that I know will eventually open.
Tuesday became the axis around which the entire week revolved.
On my drive to work, I witnessed a motorcycle strike a doe. She lay broken in the road, struggling to lift her head, confused and terrified. A stranger did the only compassionate thing left to do. Three quiet gunshots echoed across the pavement, ending her suffering while breaking something open inside me.
The tears I had been holding back for weeks finally arrived.
Later that day, I sat with Patty for the first time since hospice had fully taken over. She lay peacefully in the hospital bed that now occupied the center of her living room. Sedated. Comfortable. Beyond conversation. Beyond fixing.
I finally understood something I had never truly lived before.
There are seasons when love asks,
“How can I fix this?”
And there are seasons when love quietly asks,
“How can I accompany this?”
This is the latter.
It is one of the hardest lessons my heart has ever been asked to learn.
That evening, exhausted and nearly empty, I accepted comfort from someone who once occupied the center of my life.
We shared dinner.
We listened together to the voice recording I made on the night my marriage ended—a recording neither of us had ever heard. We cried for different reasons than we would have two years ago.
It did not reopen the relationship.
It measured the distance I have traveled.
I no longer confuse familiarity with home.
A few days later, when Zach asked to stay again, I smiled gently and said no.
My boundaries are stronger than my empathy.
Those words are no longer a philosophy.
They have become my way of walking through the world.
As the week continued, I found myself asking a different question than usual.
Not, “How much can I accomplish?”
But,
“What really matters today?”
The answer surprised me with its simplicity.
My body.
I filled my refrigerator after weeks of eating whatever was easiest.
I made crockpot dinner.
I baked banana apple bread.
I took a long walk.
I cared for the woman who has been carrying all of this.
Sometimes stewardship looks like leadership.
Sometimes it looks like groceries.
Then, just when I thought the deer story had ended…
Nature offered another chapter.
One quiet morning, while drinking tea on my balcony, I heard rustling in the woods behind my home. A mother deer and her tiny fawn burst into view, chasing one another through the trees with effortless joy.
They played exactly where the world was still being the world.
And I understood.
Earlier that week, one deer had taught me compassion for suffering.
Another reminded me that life continues creating itself.
Neither erased the other.
Both were telling the truth.
That became the quiet teaching of this entire week.
Grief is true.
Joy is true.
Mercy is true.
Play is true.
Death is true.
Life is true.
None cancels the others.
I also found myself returning again and again to three principles from my Purple Codex.
Radical Integrity: asks me to tell the truth.
Coherent Discernment: asks what deserves my attention.
Energetic Stewardship: asks me to care for the vessel carrying it all.
Together, they have become the braid that is guiding me through this season.
I used to think resilience meant pushing through.
This week taught me something gentler.
Sometimes resilience looks like moving only millimeters.
Sometimes leadership is simply arriving.
Sometimes the bravest thing I can do is sit beside someone I love while knowing there is nothing left to fix.
I cannot choose when the door opens.
I cannot negotiate with the monster waiting beyond it.
But I can choose how I inhabit the waiting room.
I can nourish my body.
I can walk beneath the trees.
I can hold boundaries that honor my future.
I can accompany those I love.
I can tell the truth.
I can keep becoming the woman I have spent years growing into.
And perhaps that is enough.
Because this week reminded me of something I hope I never forget.
The circle is never broken.
One deer taught me that mercy sometimes arrives with tears.
Another taught me that joy keeps running through the forest anyway.
Both are telling the truth.