I recently emailed with a good friend, both of us catching up on the past couple of months. She’s been struggling with change, but is looking forward to a trip abroad, to getting “culture-shocked.” I’ve been walking through a dark room, trying to believe I’ll find the door handle, but I told her about the side trips out the back to beautiful places: Mexico, Rapa Nui, and soon, Machu Picchu. She told me I’m “living the life.”

 

The other weekend, there was a children’s birthday party in the backyard.

 

At first, the words threw my head back a bit—Living. The. Life.—But I have to agree to a certain extent. Day to day, I have the privilege to write my story and take care of a sweet dog and spend time with the children at the orphanage. While we play, I sometimes picture them 20 years down the road. Where will the innocence in their faces go? What will they remember of this time? How will they beat the odds? Because they will; I already see the tenacity and the wit in many of them. In the evenings, I make dinner. Ryan and I talk about the day at hand or the one farther into the past now or the ones up ahead. At 9 PM, we often watch “Property Virgins” and daydream about owning a house and all the things in it. We run through our hypothetical “wish list”: a nice yard for Ruby, an open kitchen, an airy, well-lit place for my desk, and a sizable garage space for Ryan. We go to bed. We repeat. It’s a comfortable routine. Were Lorenzo here with us, I’m sure I would say without a doubt that I’m living the life.

 

I looked down when they started chanting: “Pi-ña-ta! Pi-ña-ta! “

 

But he isn’t. There’s grief everywhere. There’s a sub-routine of blood testing and waiting. There are the realities of age and biology and dumb luck.

 

Diving in for such perfect, simple joy.

 

I will say this: I’m living a life. That’s all we can ask of ourselves, right? We have our set number of days, never more than we think we’ll have. We endure the hardships that stun and clarify and then become part of the pain management. We dip our toes into something that thrills us. We get to know ourselves better. We teach and we learn. When we’re at our most conscious, we think of others first and consider the bigger picture. We don’t ask: “Why me?” We try patience on for size.

 

Anyone looking at them, any of them, might think they’re living the life.

 

Living the life… It does make me wonder how I’ll look back on this time: these few years as an expat in Chile, this one particularly horrible year I’m rounding the home stretch of, this time to take care of my small family, these people I’ve met and conversations I’ve had because I live outside the U.S., these hundreds of hearts we’ve collected together. I wonder how my memory will shift it all. I wonder if the grief changes colors, like a bruise. It only takes a moment to be back inside every sensory detail of that hospital room last June. It’s everything that has come after that’s susceptible to time. I realize it’s a luxury to have the time at all. To live a life.