by Donna Carroll Batton

Created on: October 10, 2009   Last Updated: October 15, 2009

Although the sun has finally come out here after two days of gloomy rain, the melancholy lingers. My heart is weighed down as pessimistic thoughts swarm like bees in my head. The future is full of both certainty and uncertainty. While trying to look forward to more peaceful times I'm too aware of what must come first.

Until ten years ago my life was very normal even mundane. I married, too young, a year after graduating high school, and after a sluggish start due to a small infertility problem, gave birth to five children within six years, four girls with one boy sandwiched in between. My husband was a gambler and a tyrant, something not overly evident when we were still so young. After twenty-three years we were divorced.

My life was then filled with raising five teenagers, working full time and, eventually, going back to school. I received a bachelor degree in social work when I was fifty-two. I had been working in social services with the county in which I lived and I loved my job as an adult protection caseworker. I retired in 2000 after twenty years with the county.

After being single for almost thirteen years, I met and married a wonderful man who proved to be my soul mate. We worked through the challenges of having two different families and living thirteen hundred miles apart. The first four years of our marriage I lived in Florida with my husband. The year after we were married he had a major heart attack leading to a heart and kidney transplant. Though very sick, with prayers and hope, he was on the mend.

After four years in Florida my husband and I moved back to my native state of New York. My elderly mother was trying to care for my invalid brother. We sold our house in Florida and moved in with my mother and brother.

Now, here we are, four years later. My mother is now approaching her ninety-sixth birthday and my brother, who is eleven months younger than I am, is in gravely ill health. I am sole caretaker of all three, husband, mother and brother. Though my husband is doing pretty well, the medicine he is on and must take for the rest of his life, continue to spawn other problems. He's been in the hospital with chicken pox, again for shards of a blood clot shooting into his toes and now has developed asthma. Unfortunately, we have the upstairs rooms in mom's house and the stairs are murder on his breathing.

I haven't added yet that I lost my thirty-five year old daughter to cervical cancer ten years ago. That experience has left me with

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