Last year on my birthday my dad wrote the following in his birthday email to me:

“Mom and I are very proud of you, and very impressed with how well you and Jarrod have integrated yourself into [your] community….It is said that a person’s wealth can be measured by how many friends they have; if so, you and Jarrod have riches galore.

You also have inherited your Mom’s talent (and perhaps some of mine) with the written word….You have had a lot to write about over the last year; not all of is has involved fun times; but your spirit remains indomitable. And I love that about you.”

It’s one of the best compliments my dad ever gave me (up there with “you have a good heart”) and something I try to live into. In that spirit, I think that Dad would have been proud that yesterday, A Practical Wedding (APW) published an essay I wrote about the past year. Last year when I posted a comment on an APW happy hour that I was trying to figure out what to do because I might lose all my hair right before my wedding, people were kind. Not only did other commenters provide advice and tips and well wishes, but Maddie (who works at APW) sent links to posts dealing with cancer and weddings and then did even more.

See, APW does a partnership with Pantene Beautiful Lengths where they encourage women to donate hair or money to Pantene Beautiful Lengths so that women undergoing chemo can receive wonderful free wigs. A lot of women grow their hair out for the weddings then get drastic cuts after the wedding. Through this partnership, those cuts can help women. They can help women like me.

Maddie got me in touch with Pantene Beautiful Lengths and I soon had a beautiful wig in a cute style that was pretty much my exact hair color. It was insanely kind. When Maddie emailed me last week to ask if I could share an update because she was prepping a post about the partnership, I think she got a bit more than she bargained for. I was preparing to head to Cleveland for a baseball game and was in a rush so I typed up a quick summary email and attached an essay I’d been playing with in case she could use it to pull any quotes for her post.

She asked if they could edit the essay for length and post it, which felt like a huge compliment. Dad had often complimented my writing and said that it was a meaningful gift for me to share.

Ernest Hemingway said that writing is easy, “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Well, I tend to use a laptop (sometimes an actual paper notebook) but I try to be honest. I guess if I were following Hemingway’s quote, I’d say that I bleed, but then try to organize and clean up the blood so it makes some sense. I also usually have to pet Toby and convince him it’s okay for me to type.

I don’t know if my writing will help anyone other than myself. It could just be a selfish act that helps me make sense of the world. But maybe it’s something that can help others in the APW community, the way that I was helped.

If one reader donates hair or money to Pantene Beautiful Lengths because of my essay, or one reader is moved to find and give kindness, then I think I’ll have done something good.

Regardless, in a month where I’m missing my dad like crazy (October was also his birthday month), it feels right that an essay sharing how love and kindness kept me going despite the worst year of my life is published on APW. APW has a wide readership so I hope it inspires another reader to be kind and indomitable, no matter what life brings.

I hope it does some good.