Unexpected

 People like to pretend that life unravels slowly. That calamity sends warning shots. That if you pay attention you can sidestep the worst of it.

Not always. Sometimes life just swings.

August twenty fifth. Fifteen years of service turned into a digital signature on a redundancy form. The job that built my reputation gone before the ink dried. The timing was cruel. Which is to say, it was real.

Then September fourteenth. My mother. The one who carried me, prayed for me, and worried over every lost direction in my life. Gone. I had the gift of one last visit in July. I got to say goodbye face-to-face. But when it came time to lay her to rest, I watched from Dubai. My cousin sent me a video of the funeral. My brothers and nephews carried the casket. I carried the distance.

Try grieving through a screen. It scratches the soul raw.

October thirteenth. My son is arrested over a handful of marijuana. A young man’s mistake, despite all our warnings, now inflated into a legal storm. Incarcerated. Locked away. A parent only breaks one way in times like that. You go to war. His release on November twenty-eighth was relief mixed with rage. The judgment comes December eleventh. We wait again. At least he's out and at home.

And in the background, survival never took a day off.

In May, before the dominoes fell, I quietly opened my own company. Just in case. The insurance plan you build when you sense a shifting wind. Thank God for instinct. And for a wife whose cleaning business has outlived most CEOs I have ever worked for. I drive. I lift. I work. I provide. Pride does not pay bills. Action does.

What did I do next?

I suffered. Then I moved. Survival mode is not glamorous. It is breathing. It is showing up. It is mourning without the privilege of collapse. It is thinking about your mother while navigating rush hour. It is answering your son’s calls with steadiness when your hands shake.

Unexpected loss teaches a brutal truth.

You do not rebuild because you are strong.
You rebuild because no one else can do it for you.

There are nights when fear sits close. There are mornings when doubt wakes up first. But here I am. Still standing. Still pushing forward. Still refusing to let chaos claim the final say.

The blows came fast. The lessons are arriving slower.

And one of them is this.
Survival is a skill.
Healing is a choice.
Hope is a discipline.

I am learning all three.

Now tell me, Reader, because this is the crossroads underneath the narrative:
Are you surviving in order to rebuild your own life
or rebuilding your life in order to survive?

I write

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