The Tender

How To Get From Disappointment to Delight

What gets you from where you are to where you want to be?

The water in front of me right now is cerulean and cyan, rippling gently in the light breeze beside a small freighter and the docked cruise ships beyond. I’m on my very first cruise—can you believe that I am on a cruise? My parents offered to bring me along with my sister, them, and two of their dear friends on an epic adventure to celebrate my younger sister Kenzie surviving ten years since the heart attack that nearly took her life during the Christmas of 2014.

Two days before Christmas, Kenzie had a massive heart attack that took far too long for anyone to notice because who expects a twenty year old soccer player to have a heart attack? Within hours, we went from joking in her hospital room to saying goodbye one by one in an ICU while a balloon pump kept her heart beating.

It’s been a decade and I still cannot write that without almost sobbing in public.

Kenzie was life-flighted from Montana to Salt Lake City, but we were all told she likely wouldn’t survive the flight. When you watch the life leaving the body of someone you’ve loved before their tiny fingers ever even wrapped around your hands and their tiny eyes ever opened for the very first time, it alters the animation of your own body. You can no longer walk through life trusting it will be long and good. Your eyes and heart and cells learn in an instant that their very continuance is a fragile, precious gift. Control crumbles into dust.

If you have parents like mine, you grow up believing you can be almost anything, achieve whatever you set your mind to, and that the only limits on your life will be the ones you place on yourself.¹ When some absurd and horrific thing happens to you or someone you love, agency itself begins to spin and shatter. The bright beautiful world with cerulean seas and palm trees with fronds that sway in the breeze is no longer trustworthy.