Love and a Little Luck

Hey there, we’re the Stoneciphers and we’ve had just an absolute nightmare of a month of June.

Earlier this year, we had found that we were expecting. We were very excited and waiting with bated breath to welcome our new addition. That hope unfortunately came to an end on the second of June, just four days before our daughter Gwendolyn’s second birthday. She was so excited to become a big sister, but it just wasn’t meant to be.

Life being a balancing act, this horrible news came with a caveat of positivity. As it happened, the loss of our baby boy, Atticus, had also brought to our attention the early stages of ovarian cancer that my wife Samantha had apparently entered. This resulted in a partial oophorectomy, with a portion of one of her ovaries needing to be removed.

After we lost our boy, we struggled for a few weeks through various waves of the stages of depression, but with Gwendolyn’s birthday, we knew we needed to maintain positivity, at least visibly, for her sake, so we did as little to disturb our existing plans as possible.

This included a trip we had already been planning and had already paid for: a trip to St. Louis to see the Wiggles at the Stifel Theatre. Troubles with this trip arose within days of Atticus’ passing, with significant issues with our travel arrangements, lodging, and transportation all occurring within the span of a day or two.

The friends with whom we were going to be able to stay at no cost had other responsibilities rear their heads, so now the cost of lodging had exponentially increased. The vehicle we had been planning on taking began to have serious mechanical issues, which resulted in incurring a not unreasonably large debt to my in-laws for repair costs, for which I am eternally grateful that they were even able to help.

But still we soldiered on. We found a relatively inexpensive hotel in East St. Louis to stay at, and a few free attractions to spend some time at since we now had significantly less working capital for the trip. The day of the Wiggles concert arrived, and our beloved van once again decided that the heat was simply too much and committed to executing itself once more.

Samantha spent the entirety of Sunday sitting in an emergency mechanic shop hoping against hope that the repairs would be completed before the time to arrive at the concert. The very absolute last thing we wanted was to end up missing the concert, the very reason we were even IN St. Louis.

Through the love and glory of the empathy between kind human beings, Samantha was able to get back to our hotel with our car seat for Gwendolyn. The van remained inoperable. Uber was our only option to still make it to the concert we had already paid for.

We were able to secure a ride within which we could fit her car seat and ourselves, at no small cost, naturally, both to the concert and then back to the mechanic shop where the work had been completed by the unbelievably wonderful folks in the emergency weekend auto shop. We absolutely cannot thank them enough.

Exhausted, we puttered home on Monday, ready to return to a sense of normalcy at home.

“Normalcy,” for us, at least, is apparently dismay, doom, and dying vehicles, as upon returning home and attempting to get our other vehicle’s registration updated, it also decided it would rather be dead that continue driving in this weather, and that is where we currently find ourselves.

Deeply in debt and with only one operable vehicle, and no way to get our heads above water long enough to take a breath.