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Caroline Wright reads Lasting Love to her two sons.
When the bottom falls out How do we manage to show up for our children while confronting the unimaginable? by C A R O L I N E W R I G H T / photo by J O S H U A H U S T O N
On March 3, 2017, a week before my 33rd birthday, I was diagnosed with a rare, very aggressive brain tumor called a glioblastoma multiforme. A week earlier I underwent a craniotomy to remove a very
large tumor from the frontal lobe of my brain and I had returned to my neurosurgeon to discover the results of its pathology. A hospital tech had just removed 41 staples from my scalp and placed them in a small plastic bag next to me on the crisp white paper stretched across the patient’s bench. I was the Patient, the object of discussion; not the writer, cookbook author or mother of my former life. It was official, in the wails of my husband and mother’s surprise and agony in that moment: My life, as I knew it then, was over.
After a diagnosis like that, it’s strange to think life didn’t actually stop. That I, as the patient, had to get in a car and go home and somehow continue. I was still a mom of two crazy little boys, then 1 and 4, and had just moved to Seattle. My diagnosis had just become another fact of our lives then to navigate around. Though the bottom fell out of my life and my whole world changed in an instant, some things stayed the same. Like parenting. The CONTINUED ON NEXT PAGE >
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