Invincible Summer

On June 12th I will be running the National Multiple Sclerosis Society DuskBuster run. It is a short run with a lot of backstory for me. For a long, long time I have avoided all things MS. My mother was diagnosed with chronic progressive multiple sclerosis when I was 13. It was the disease in the house that touched everything. The outward signs progressed from cane to wheelchair to eventually complete confinement to bed, and were nothing compared to the inner challenges we all faced. She died from complications one week before I turned 21. MS took everything: my youth, my mom, my faith in things making sense. In the aftermath I questioned the meaning behind it all, and came up with nothing. Eventually I realized it was up to me to make meaning from it, and I feel like my life ever since has been in pursuit of this. So for a decade and a half, I shut out MS and refused to let it touch anything else in my life. It was easy enough to do; it's not so common a disease, doesn't