Weathering Life
By Angelique Zerillo, CG
I missed summer.
That’s not a typo—as in, I miss summer—like a long-distance lover misses their true love from across the miles. No, this is heartache for my other true love—nature. Specifically, putting my feet in the sand and my body in Lake Michigan.
Beach days are my happy place. The pit I felt around losing access to a season felt like missing a great love—an absolute somatic disconnect. My internal clock and my calendar? Cattywampus for months afterward. The beach is where my body and brain feel safe enough to dial down the fight, the flight, the freeze, and the fawn that is part of my modern existence, especially as a woman.
In delightfully generous ways, nature needs far less from us than we do from it. That level of generosity without the need for reciprocity is restorative, especially for those like me who are built to show up and deliver as caregivers. But, around 9 am on a Monday last July, this caregiver’s phone rang, calling her up for a tour of both love and duty.
You are the sky. Everything else—
it’s just the weather.
― Pema Chödrön
This mom couldn’t face our sun because she had to face one of her sons, who, while walking with hundreds of other morning commuters in downtown Chicago, was hit and critically injured by a distracted driver. He was the only person struck in the crosswalk, miraculously. The odds of that single occurrence in an ant stream of humans crossing the street are still something we can’t wrap our quant brains around. The luck of that moment. For him, not so much. For others, gratefully so, as no human should be served that amount of suffering in one blow.
In follow-up calls and conversations with those who witnessed the event, I’ve realized that even being adjacent to the scene has shifted their worlds, too. Gratitude for life after this experience is celebrated in our home. But, that is on balance with the reality that there is a life here now that will be physically challenged and shifted forever. And that is no small thing.
In my son’s own words, recounting the event later, “I’m glad it was me, Mom. There was a woman about ten feet ahead of me in the crosswalk. She never would have made it.” That sweet woman, another mom, was one of the many who stayed by his side, taking critical, life-saving first steps until emergency personnel could arrive.
In hindsight, I wore the dumbest outfit that day as I rushed out the door to get to the hospital. I dressed for the weather, not the event. That event —a month-long parenting marathon of support, posted up first adjacent to a hospital bed in an ICU, then in a hospital room, and then in an acute rehabilitation care facility until my husband and I brought all that care back home. We did not leave his side.
Day and night. Night and day. Alternating with a little fresh air and sunshine, like a swimmer coming up for air between laps and flip turns. Those were the luxuries and brief breaks I had in between the life grip I held on my son’s now man-sized hand. I’ve never been awake for so many sunrises in a row before.
For weeks I ran on adrenaline, caffeine, gifted meals, support from family and friends (who kept a gentle buffer from us trapped up in the castle of critical care and the outside world), and high-dose edibles (which are appropriate for my consumption level as one who has struggled with chronic musculoskeletal pain for decades). Those edibles, both my anchors and sails, were my access to the cannabis plant during one of my hardest parenting moments to date. I joked with friends who work in the cannabis sector that the waiting room outside of surgery should be revamped as a consumption lounge. If ever there was a place where we needed to calm our nervous systems down with plant medicine, that’s the locale.
I lived out of a backpack like a college kid traveling through Europe for a month, going home every two to three nights to repack that bag with fresh clothes, snacks, edibles, a winter hat to sleep in, and a sweater to battle the air conditioning up in that sterile box in the sky. I wore that sweater every day for a month. My sweater. My warrior’s costume.
From the front, it looks like a classic, preppy, man’s button-down cardigan. From the back, it resembles art from a 1970s Kung Fu movie poster or something you’d see on a Chinese Zodiac chart—a tiger knitted into it stretching from shoulder to waist, ready to pounce into action. I get a lot of compliments when I wear it. It’s a visual surprise. And, generally speaking, we delight in surprises that don’t knock us sideways from our path, don’t we? I joked with the nurses, clinicians, and even the lovely woman who brought me two cups of coffee every morning after 5:30 am surgical rounds that I was there to give that negative “Tiger Mom” label a fresh rebranding. My icebreaker sweater, entendre intended.
I label myself mom first before any other title I attach to myself, which still feels odd to share in 2025 within a professional context like this magazine that I am editor and co-founder of. And yet, it is critical at this point in history to lead with that soft and strong declaration that there is nothing more important than family (or the community of love you wrap yourself in, as my chosen family truly showed up for me and my made family during this skipped season).
Moments like these require us to show up thoughtfully. Carefully. Entirely. Supporting the build. And the rebuild if times call for change and growth. My lesson from this past year: It is okay to put some things to bed if they aren’t serving you. That’s where we are in my house after such trauma and drama. That’s where we are in this new industry, too, growing out of a mother plant called Cannabis Sativa L.
Our family’s experience, individually and collectively, speaks to where we all sit globally in this time of change. Life’s randomness is profoundly unmooring. If we can find ways to anchor ourselves—to nature, to ourselves, and to our communities—we generally find safe paths forward. And with a little distance from all the weather that weathers us, we gain perspective. That perspective shifts our focus, and a shifted focus helps us realign our purpose.
My purpose, you ask? Has it shifted much since the accident?
Very much so, with the exception of one thing. I’m still packing edibles and a sweater for every journey this year.
