Dear Devon,

Look at how cute you are! Three weeks and three days already. 24 days old … before you know it you will be a month old. Grandma has not seen you in over two weeks and she is pretty bummed about that. I also can’t believe how good you are holding your neck up. I am very impressed. You look like your Dad in this picture too! I wonder if you will look like your Dad when you are older. I also love how you are looking at your Mom, it looks like you are wondering who she is.

There are so many things we can not control in our lives Devon. It is a very hard lesson to learn as a human being. We think we can control the outcome of many things, but then circumstances change and things end up completely different than we think they should be, or different than we planned. I was planning on being able to help your mom out for the first few weeks of your life. I had hoped to be able to come and go (even though you live exactly 239 miles away from your family here) with ease during those important weeks. I really wanted to see your Mom BECOME your Mom. You made your Mom a mom! Just like she made me a Mom. Such a wonderful, sacred thing to happen, a rare chance at transformation. Yet, here we are. I am far away from you and her. Out of my control. This pandemic has really made me relearn the lesson that there is indeed so much out of my control.

I will share with you another moment in time when Grandma realized there was not much in life we could control. When your Uncle Luke was a baby — actually he was quite a bit older than you — he was 21 months old, he was exposed to E.coli O157:H7. We never did find out where he had picked up this really nasty bacteria. Exposure to it usually comes from eating contaminated food ( some raw leafy vegetables) or from undercooked meat. This E.coli is found in the gut and poop of many animals, but especially cattle. The Health Department in our county investigated a nearby apple orchard that Uncle Luke had been to — thinking that exposure to the petting zoo there may have caused his illness. They also checked out the water play table at your Aunt Grace’s nursery school, in case his exposure had occurred there. Not all people exposed to the bacteria develop what Uncle Luke did, most just have a bout or two of diarrhea and are ok. However, Uncle Luke developed Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome and got very very sick. He had bloody diarrhea and his platelet count — which helps your blood to clot so you don’t bleed too much was really, really low. It was 10,000 when it should have been between 150,000 and 450,000. His kidneys stopped making urine. He was hospitalized for over two weeks and had to have surgery to put in a peritoneal dialysis shunt. It was a very very scary time for Grandma, Grandpa and your Mom, Aunts Chloe and Grace and Uncle Sam. But, Uncle Luke ended up being just fine. His kidneys started working again and after a couple of months of high blood pressure everything was normal. We were so grateful!

Yet there were many lessons Grandma learned during this crisis. The first was — there are things that are not in my control. At all. And you can do all the right things and the outcome is still not in your control. There was no one to fault for Uncle Luke’s crisis. I knew that I could not change the outcome for Uncle Luke, that we made sure he had the best medical care possible, I stayed with him all day and every night, providing him with love and comfort, but that ultimately what I wanted to happen might not. However, what I hoped for did happen and Luke was ok, but I did not will it to be so. This pandemic is also teaching me that I have no control over an outcome. I will do my best to not expose my family or myself to the Covid19 virus but I am may still be exposed at some point. I can not control when the pandemic will reach it’s peak or subside. That is independent of my wishes and desires. I can do my part but that is all I really can control. When Luke was sick and in the hospital I could not control the speed of his recovery but I could be there with love and my presence. I can not control when we will be back to some normalcy from this pandemic but I can see my part in doing the right thing in my community as a loving gesture towards my family, friends and neighbors.

I am not writing this for you to be sad or feel helpless. There are things that we can do about our human condition. One of the things we can do is recognize it and accept the reality of those things which we truly can not change. We do own a great majority of the narrative or our lives but we do not own all of it. The narrative of my life right now was going to be watching you grow in your early weeks and supporting your Mom in her new role. That is not happening, and it is out of my control. What I can do is alter the narrative by watching you grow by video, or talking to Mom on the phone and using Facetime to see her become a mom. Is it my ideal? No. Will there be gifts I can open because of it? Yes. Now I will cherish the time with you and your Mom and Dad. I will be more appreciative of my new status as a Grandma, I will not take that for granted — I am so blessed! I may not recover the time with you that was lost but I will make sure the time to come is not taken for granted. So a new story gets written, a new perspective. Always, always something to learn — about ourselves and others. And always, always new ways to grow.

Love you and miss you Devon,

Grandma