How To Overcome (Almost) Anything

Hint: we are stronger than we give ourselves credit for

Photo by William Farlow on Unsplash

Six months ago, I was suddenly ensnared in a nightmare I did not cause nor ask for. We’d been in the process of divorce, he and I, when he fell sick. Sickness transitioned to critical illness, and I went to the ends of the earth to save his life, to advocate for him in the hospital (hint: that’s useless, even if you have a medical power of attorney), only to stand helplessly, powerlessly, and watch him die after reluctantly turning off the life support.

Fast-forward, and trust me, there’s plenty of fast-forwarding to do. Now alone, I scrambled. There were two themes in my life: grieving and survival.

I found myself locked in a battle between intense emotion and dissociated pragmatism.

On one hand, I’d just lost one of the most important human beings in my life. On the other, I had to fight to survive.

He had, after all, been the breadwinner and business administrator with whom I had planned to continue working. Unfortunately, I was dependent upon that plan, with no backup.

I was suddenly saddled with an entire (flailing) business that I had no clue how to run. I did not have the logins to any of the systems, websites, or even the computers he used them on. I knew the bank accounts were hemorrhaging money, thousands every month (concurrent with barely a trickle of income), but I did not know to which entities, so I couldn’t stop the services before another monthly automatic withdrawal went through.

I was also saddled with a lot of Stuff, both trash and treasure, and it was up to me to move everything out and try to make sense of it all.

When the survival fight is on

You learn the true meaning of the word “hustle”, because every day is one. Looking up each item to see what it might be, how it might be used, and how much I might be able to sell it for became a full-time job in itself.

But if I could sell enough of his old textbooks, equipment, or miscellaneous junk we’d collected over the years, and I could make $50, $100 every few days, that means I could feed my cats (who come first) and maybe even buy groceries on time that…