By Brenda Cannon Henley
This has been a tough first year. My life in the great state of Texas reads like a fairy tale and I always planned for and expected the “happily ever after” part. Didn’t work out quite like I planned. My husband of nearly a decade, who was my earnest cowboy hero, died a year ago on August 16th after a terrific and fierce battle with cancer, the treatments, and the after effects. I thought right up until the very end that he would get better. The doctors initially believed he could be healthy and happy again, but that was not God’s plan.

Ted was a good man and kind to almost everyone he met, but he could be tough, too, when the situation called for strength. I remember writing in one of my books, Winds over Bolivar, that Ted was a fixer of things and of people. We had our lives all planned out and had worked hard to provide the necessary finances to accomplish those goals. We lived where most folks want to vacation. We traveled at will, we visited family and friends, and we fished or played on the beaches of the Southeast Texas Gulf Coast. He collected boats of all shapes and sizes (and I am still paying for that hobby of his).

I loved to cook his favorite foods and he loved to eat. We had many good friends that we enjoyed sharing our lives with on the Peninsula in particular. We volunteered in various charities and believed in helping others, and I still worked a good bit. Our church was important to us and we attended regularly. Ted always enjoyed the photography that went with my articles and he often accompanied me to document the interviews. We had a wonderful life up until he was suddenly diagnosed with cancer on February 18, 2014.

During the past twelve months, I have learned to live a different life, but I am accepting what God had in mind and moving on as best I can. One of the things I have had to learn to cope with is keeping positive. I have always thought of myself as positive, a believer, living by faith, reaching out to others, and I enjoy laughing and having fun as much as anyone. Opening a hospital bill with a balance owed column of over one and one half million dollars can dull positivity in a quick second. (Of course, we had insurance and it had just not been settled when those bills started arriving). Making many decisions about Ted’s possessions (like the boats) did not come easy for me. Cleaning closets and tool boxes, seeing his photos everywhere in our home, seeing that old beloved red Dodge truck, discovering so many worthy, but unfinished, projects left in various stages, and learning to go places by myself has not only tried my patience, but has helped to thicken my skin.

My girls have been wonderful to me and my best friends have carefully included me in their plans and check on me from time to time. I have also made new friends and continue to write for various agencies, but the lonely times have come to visit, too. I find myself wondering about decisions, expenses, repairs, and trips that I once would not have thought twice about choosing.

When I get into real trouble are the times I drift into negative thinking. I allow trusting to be moved out of place and I try to figure things out for myself or for others. It doesn’t work that way. We either trust God or we don’t.

Having been a reader for most of my life, I have tried to surround myself with good material and it has helped more than the writers and givers of great books can know. I read three long articles this very week about the power of positive thinking and one, in particularly, helped me get back on track. I learned that we must control our thinking and especially so, in times of loss or great stress. And I have learned grief has no timetable and each individual handles it on his or her level.

I have learned to stop thinking quite so much in absolutes. Because of my profession of writing, I like things to be in black and white. Sometimes, they are not. Gray confuses me and sometimes makes me angry. I like immediate answers to questions. There are times I don’t get them and so I must learn to wait and to trust God. I have also had to learn to stop giving power to negative thoughts and to work more at giving power to positive ones. I have caught myself thinking, “This just cannot work out. It is simply too complicated.” Instead, I should have thought, “Give it a chance. This may be God’s plan for this time in your life.” I am learning to stop looking at what others say and do as negative before I truly know the intent. I am tired of jumping to conclusions. Everyone is not bad (although I have met some scandalous folks intent on taking money from a recent widow), but thank God, I have met many nice people as well.

One big hurdle I am overcoming is the realization that life is often not the way I wanted it to be, or the way I wrote the script, and that it is under no obligation to give me exactly what I expected or wanted. I am practicing the old quote, “Pray as if God will take care of it all; but act as if it is all up to me.” I am choosing to live a positive, though different, life. Let’s look today at where our lives are on the positive/negative scale of life.

(This article published 8/10/2015)

Brenda Cannon Henley can be reached at (409) 781-8788, at
[email protected], or by using the contact form below.

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