The Year of Living Dangerously

It was exactly one year ago tonight that my life began its most recent downward spiral. 

That's the night we took Ozzie to the vet and got the news that to this day is among the worst I've ever heard: lymphoma. (Three months later, he was gone.) A week later, I was haggling with the car repair people to get Pearl in for her post-hail repair and a week after that, I was haggling to get her back.
 And then, a few days after I got Pearl back, I found out I was losing my job … or half of it anyway, along with a significant chunk of my salary.

My car. My dog. My job. Except for family and friends, everything near and dear to me was under attack and so was I, if by proxy. For months, I was almost afraid to wake up, sure that yet another siege was just around the corner.

Instead, except for the occasional plunge to the depths, things seem to have reached some kind of plateau during the past several months. And while that's not a bad thing, it's not necessarily a good thing either. It's definitely better. It just seems like it should be better than that, if that makes sense.

It's not that I'm not grateful; I am. I know how much worse it all could have been. Still though I can't help but hope that it won't be much longer before I've crawled farther away from the abyss and am scaling the mountaintop.

There's always next year, right?