So the last five years have been hard ones for our large family. I have four sisters, two older and two younger, and four brothers, all older. All four of my brothers are married and have children, and one of my older sisters is married. I have been through two very difficult deployments, one of my brothers is Navy and was deployed at the same time as my husband. It was a first for his family to go through a year long deployment, they were used to six month stints on ship. One of our deployments was 15 months and the other 12 months. Dean missed daddy and really struggled, I just wanted him home safe. I understood why he was doing what he was doing. More than I think than most of my friends did when their husbands left (well outside of the church). During that time I missed my sister get married (my husband just came home and I talked to her about it, we agreed I needed to be with him). That was hard for me, my brother-in-law is fantastic and you could see the love that he had for my sister. Not even a year later, she passed away from cancer, barely missing their anniversary by 10 days, her birthday by four days. It rocked my large little family to the core. We all miss her dearly. Shortly after that, my mother's health (who had been battling her own cancer for around 13 years) started to get worse. She was a breast cancer survivor on top of the other cancer she was fighting. My mother was a fighter. She made it another two years, and missed her birthday by 20 days. This was another blow to our large little family. Our mother was the core to our family with our dad, they were married for almost 50 years, and their faith and love for each other and the church is so strong. We are an eternal family because of them. We grew up with the greatest example of love and trust in our home. We never doubted our parents love for each other, what a comfort that is and was as children. I know that is what I strive to show my son in my marriage today, trust and love and faith in the gospel. To top it all off, we are still trying to stabilize Dean. He still struggles at home. School is going well. He is getting good grades and has friends now. At times that is a tad shaky but the ones that he does have that are close, they are boulders in his life. Unmoving and constant. He took grandma passing really hard. He is very close to my parents. They were there for us in a huge way after my divorce from my first husband. My dad babysat to ease my finances, which allowed for a different relationship with him than they had with their other grandchildren. My dad might deny it, but I have witnesses, lol, to this change. He is special to them, especially my dad. Losing grandma upset Dean in a big way. I have yet to see him really deal with it, which worries me. With my sister, he cried more. I hope to see some emotions soon, or I will be more worried.
So you might be asking, what is with the title. Yes, life is hard, but it is worth it. There is a quote in my church that has our Savior attached to it: "I never said it would be easy, I only said it would be worth it". So yes while life is hard, it is always worth it to Endure to the End. I want to be an eternal family, to see my grandma, my mother, the grandparents that I have never met, all of them, my sister. I love them all and strive to do my best to be a good person and follow the gospel the way my Heavenly Father and Jesus Christ, my Savior, want me to. That alone, with the knowledge of what follows with the Second Coming is what makes this life worth it. While my heart aches for those I have lost, which includes the loss of my grandmother in 1997, I know that I will see them again and that I will spend eternity with them and my husband and my son. So yes, hard but worth it.
