by Lauren Rowans

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” –Albert Einstein

Inspirational quotes fill Hallmark cards, line gift shop shelves, and dominate our social media news feeds. They can be uplifting in times of struggle. But the quotes that I find to be the most helpful are the ones that acknowledge the unimaginable pain we feel, while also reminding us that we have a choice in how we interpret and react to it.

None of us on this journey would have chosen a front-row seat to the devastation wrought by frontotemporal degeneration. The last few years in the Rowans household could only be described as survival mode – all of us dangling by a well-worn thread.

But now we find ourselves on the other side. My husband Tim died from complications of bvFTD on September 2, 2019, at the age of 45. Becoming a widow at 39 will never cease to feel weird and tragic to me. And yet, the good that has come from our family’s FTD journey indisputably outweighs the bad. It took me a while to come to that conclusion. One specific quote, by the motivational speaker Jay Shetty, put things into perspective for me: “Some people pass through our lives in a shorter time frame than we had hoped, to teach us things they never could have taught us if they stayed.”

Tim, in both life and death, taught me the following invaluable life lessons, which I will always carry with me: Don’t wait until tomorrow. It’s OK for things to suck sometimes. Move forward. You never know what someone else is going through. Grief and happiness can coexist. Transparency breeds connection. If you’re feeling powerless, do something.