The Soundtrack To My Life

I love music...all kinds of music...I love it all.  My parents loved music so it was always playing while  growing up.  There is a picture of my dad and I, when I was 2, dancing in our living room to a vinyl copy of "The Doors" on a wind up record player.  I'm hard-wired to love music.

Music does something to me most things cannot.  It triggers memories--not vague memories, but smells, conversations and even feelings.  Almost every distinct memory in my life has a song, or series of songs that go along with it.  Matt is pretty amazed by the amount of lyrics I know to a variety of songs.  I'm not perfect at it (who doesn't make up a lyric or two while singing a song from the eighties?), but I do know a lot.  I know the lyrics because the song I'm singing has had an impact at some point (large or small) on my life.

Some songs bring me right back to my mom's car as we made the long drive "home" (her home) to Logan, or the front seat of my dad's car buckled next to Jess while he played the "piano" on the dash, or to the 6 am snowy mornings when my mom dropped me off at cheer practice, or after my mom died when the 4 of us cried to the same songs over and over, or the songs that played during college on the long drive home or on campus, or on our wedding video, or during my first trimester with Wade (I still can't listen to some of those songs without getting nauseous), or the summer, or that vacation, or this race, the list could go on and on.  It really could.

Music makes me smile, it makes me laugh, it makes cry.  It makes me do these things often.

Currently I am training for a half marathon--my favorite race to run.  It is the perfect length--not too short, but not too long.  To be perfectly honest, I should not have signed up for this race.  I registered after brain surgery and right as radiation was beginning.  I was on top of the world. I had conquered brain surgery and was running!

I went into brain surgery with a chance of NOT ever coming out.  I had a large chance of no function in the left side of my body.  None of these things happened.  If I were being nit-picky, following surgery, I had some trouble typing and doing meticulous things with my left hand (I'm at about 95% full function now.)  I thought I could do anything--there is that silly invincible Jen coming right back (will I ever learn?)  So, I signed up for the Phoenix Half Marathon taking place on March 2, 2013 and THEN my world was ROCKED!

Radiation.  Basically indescribable to anyone.  The best way I can put it is to relate it to pregnancy.  Lots and lots of women get pregnant, with similar symptoms and even more similar outcomes, but no two pregnancies are exactly the same.  They vary from person to person, even if 2 women are sisters or something else that is close in nature.  I know people who have been through radiation.  I know people who have been through brain radiation, but I have yet to meet or speak with someone who had an experience with it like mine.  I'm not saying my experience was worse or better than anyone I know, I'm just saying it was the most horrific thing I have ever been through in my life in every possible way.

So back to the point, my body is still recovering from radiation.  I'm not complaining.  I'm actually thankful.  My radiation doc said he was going to treat me as hard and strong as I could handle...take me to the brink of death in order to get as much of this cancer as possible and he did.  My "invincible" human self could not ever have imagined my body being as weak as it was, or still is, so I thought a half marathon in March would be no problem at all.  The insane part about all of this is, I'm going to run the race!

I've been training, at a pace much slower than I used to run, and things have been going well.  I will not PR on March 2, but I don't care.  I really don't care.  I'm happy to be here, to have function of the left side of my body, to strap on my "Garmin," lace my running shoes and put in those ear buds while the soundtrack of my current life blares through my body.

I feel so alive as I run up and down the streets of my neighborhood, passing trees I've passed a hundred times, the curves of the sidewalk, how long it takes me to reach this turn, when I need to cross that street.  Everything feels so familiar yet different.  I look up and the sky is bright and open, the air is crisp and perfect and my music runs through my body like an electrical current...

...you shoot me down, but I won't fall...where there is desire there is gonna to be a flame, where there is a flame someone's bound to get burned but just because it burns, doesn't mean your gonna die you gotta get up and try, try, try...falling from cloud 9, crashing from the high...when she was just a girl she expected the world but it flew away from her reach and the bullets catch in her teeth...and I can't take it your even perfect when you cry...if I could walk on water, If I could tell you what's next, I'd make you believe, I'd make you forget...we don't even have to try, it's always a good time...watchin the time go, the second hand is moving too fast...

The best part about music is you can relate it to any situation you are going through.  Most of these songs (most of any songs) are about love and conquering the ultimate competitor known as heart break.  In all actuality I am conquering heart break.  Not heart break in a romantic, puppy love way, but causing my eternal companion and our children heart break beyond what many will ever experience in this life.

I mentioned my love for music spans all genres and it does.  A couple of Sunday's ago, we were singing a hymn I have sung many, many times, but struck me much differently than it had before.  I love these words and believe in them.  My life should have always been based on these words:

"Thy will, O Lord, be done."

His will is the best way, the only way.  I am thankful to know this with every part of who I am.