The Next Chapter... Becoming Unbroken

This weekend I took a retreat from the chaos of my everyday life and did something I haven’t done in ages – I read a book from cover to cover in two days. It was wonderful. Absolutely delightful to be lost in a well told story. There was a passage that spoke to me so loudly that I transcribed it so I can devour it over and over again. And it inspired me to come back to writing.

Perhaps the words touched my heart because of where I stand in my particular journey. As some of you know, I am preparing to take another leap of sorts. I have opened my heart to someone and in the next few weeks he will move from Denver to Austin to give us an honest chance. The amount of vulnerability required on both of our parts to take this step (and to share it with our worlds) is beyond measure.

At one time in the not so distant past, each of us experienced the greatest of loves with our respective partners – the love found in fairytales. Filled with adventure and joy, our independent stories also included tragic endings. Cancer entered our life equations and left us without our other halves. Broken.

A mutual friend saw that we might be able to help one another through our darkest days and made the introduction. Here is where the passage from this weekend’s novel (Unwritten by Charles Martin) fits in:

… and somewhere in that intersection of cracked hearts and shattered souls, they find that maybe broken is not the end of things, but the beginning. Maybe broken is what happens before you become unbroken.

What’s more, maybe our broken pieces don’t fit us. Maybe all of us are standing around with a bag of the stuff that used to be us and we’re wondering what to do with it and until we meet somebody else whose bag is full and heart empty, we can’t figure out what to do with our pieces.

And standing there, face to face, my bag of me over my shoulder and your bag of you over your shoulder, we figure out that maybe my pieces are the very pieces needed to mend you and your pieces are the very pieces needed to mend me but until we’ve been broken we don’t have the pieces to mend each other.

Maybe in the offering we discover the meaning, and value, of being broken. Maybe checking out and retreating to an island is the most selfish thing the broken can do because somewhere on the planet is another somebody standing around holding a bag of all the jagged, painful pieces of themselves and they can’t get whole without you.

Maybe love, the real kind, the kind only wished for in whispers and the kind our hearts are hardwired to want, is opening up your bag of you and risking the most painful statement ever uttered between the stretched edges of the universe: “This was once me.” 

This literally took my breath away.

I’m not saying I believe that in all circumstances one has to be broken in order to be unbroken or that one can’t be whole without another. But in our circumstances, in the story of our lives, that’s how it unfolded.

I’m also not saying “everything happens for a reason” because no sense can be found in the premature ending to two bright and shining young lives and I know we’d do almost anything to have them back. Cancer doesn’t happen for a reason. It just doesn’t.

But what happens in the aftermath – what pulls us through the darkness and back into the light – well maybe that’s when the “plan” starts to get back on track. An entirely different track, but one where light and laughter and love can be found once more.

And so with an open heart, an open mind and with all the vulnerability I can muster… I walk* further and further down the path toward becoming unbroken, toward the beginning, hand in hand with the one whose pieces fit with mine.

  

- Jen Garza

* Because this is a blog about my journey to 4,000 miles, I should mention that Britton fully supports my goal and is willing to run, bike and swim by my side to help me reach it. He loves Texas 4000 and the cancer research we support. He’d rather be hiking, climbing and skiing, so we sprinkle those in (without counting the miles) for fun ;)  I imagine a future adventure will include an outrageously tall mountain in the name of breast cancer research, but who knows. The rest is still unwritten!