Endurance, Love, and All the Things We Never Saw as Children

This summer has been one of those that flips life upside down — the Harley crash, the injuries, the slow healing, and now sitting in medical waiting rooms where courage has to be quiet and steady. For a woman who has lived through deployments, police shifts, danger, and emergencies, this is the part no one trains you for. This is the part that scares me most — the waiting, the unknown, the things I can’t control.

And as I sit with that fear, I find myself thinking a lot about endurance — where I learned it, what it looked like when I was young, and how it shows up in my life now.

I grew up in mining towns.

Towns where men left for shifts and sometimes didn’t come back.

Towns where the mountains gave work and took lives.

Towns built on grit, stubbornness, and the unspoken rule that you handled what came at you because there wasn’t any other choice.

My parents didn’t have the luxury of slow mornings, heart-to-heart talks, or therapy-speak tenderness. They had:

• bills,
• weather,
• danger,
• community,
• and survival.

Love wasn’t soft or showy.

It looked like staying.

It looked like endurance.

It looked like two people facing the world side by side, even if they didn’t speak about how hard it was.

As a kid, I didn’t see affection or emotional openness.

But I did see consistency.

They stayed together until the end — and only now do I understand how much strength that took.

Today, I look around at the younger generation — not just my own children and grandchildren, but everywhere I go — and relationships look different. More fragile, more temporary, more complicated.

Not because young people don’t care.

They do.

Deeply.

But their world is faster, more uncertain, more overwhelming.

Commitment isn’t encouraged the way it used to be.

People leave quickly because they’re scared, or tired, or trying to protect themselves.

And I don’t judge that.

I just notice it.

I hope they can see a version of endurance that isn’t perfect or pretty.

A version like mine and my husband’s — built over 44 years through:

• military separations,
• midnight patrols,
• dangerous shifts,
• fear-driven arguments,
• laughter in the middle of chaos,
• and holding each other together when life comes swinging.

We are each other’s rock — even when the ground shakes.

Because real love isn’t the absence of fear or struggle.

It’s what you do inside the fear.

Inside the stress.

Inside the waiting rooms and the bad summers and the moments that break you open.

Love is bending, but not breaking.

It’s showing up again.

And again.

And again.

That’s the kind of love I grew up watching without fully understanding.

And that’s the kind of love I hope still matters — not just in mining towns of yesterday, but for the generations coming up now.