And the flood gates were opened

I consider myself a pretty strong woman, a CF mama that takes on challenges everyday and takes them on withholding a lot of emotions so that I can just keep moving forward. However, there are days those emotions just can’t be held back and the dam of tears breaks and comes rushing through with no control. It’s always one gesture (good or bad) that does it and I wonder why did that one act of (in this case kindness) cause my emotions to come hurling at me with such vigor.

Several things have occurred recently…

• My great aunt passed away and her sister–my grandmother–is suffering this loss badly. It just breaks my heart when I learned she fainted at the funeral, couldn’t attend the burial and tells family that she feels all alone now.

• I’ve been getting ready for a week long trip to Merida, Mexico with Andrea’s high school band and have been stressing over getting everything ready, specifically meeting all of Andrea’s CF needs while we travel abroad. There’s so much entailed when traveling internationally when you have CF…I blogged about it before, so I won’t go into details now.

• Today is the birthday of Jena Cassalina. A beautiful girl that earned her angel wings six years ago when she lost her battle against CF. Thinking about her mom and how much she longs to hold her girl saddens me to the core. RIP sweet girl!

But the things that have occurred recently that ultimately left me bawling like a baby have been all the kind gestures by people who truly want to help with our fight against CF.

Donations have been coming in from people I don’t even know, because friends are spreading the word and asking for help. Heck, I have a friend who is willing to shave his long locks in hopes of raising $10K for our cause, and I haven’t a clue who is making all the donations on behalf of him. 

Then, out of the blue a childhood friend of mine posts on facebook—calling all our other elementary school friends—to match her $50 donation she just recently made. She’s even offering to send a gift for each match that is made! Well, that just did it for me today…the tears came gushing through and I couldn’t stop from crying for quite a while. I didn’t ask her to do this. She has decided to go above just donating and actually fundraise too.  WOW!

There have been so many other kind gestures as well, by people attending my fundraisers, donations made from people I’ve just become friends with, and friends that have always been there for me but are taking it up a notch to do a bit more this year. I mean, come on…how lucky can a girl get?! Knowing that people will actually set aside their precious time to help me help my child is the greatest feeling one can have. 

I was talking to another CF mama yesterday about the overwhelming feeling we get when people you wouldn’t expect much from jump in, feet first and volunteer to help in any way they can. Yes, we also have those that we think will help and actually do much to nothing, but I won’t go into that right now. I’ll leave that for another blog or maybe I won’t ever blog about it…it’s just too depressing.  So let’s keep going with the positive…as I was saying, the feeling my friend and I were talking about is a feeling hard to explain. It’s such a powerful emotion that words like thank you, appreciate, gratitude, even forever indebt aren’t enough to thoroughly express how thankful, appreciative, grateful and forever indebted we are. I mean (quoting a friend here),  “how do you thank someone who’s helping save your child’s life?” ~Kelly G.