Hey friends,
This has been a really hard month in the Musser household. I’m sure you can relate—sometimes life piles on so much all at once that you barely have time to catch your breath. As that famous saying goes, “When it rains how it pours, so hold on to your drawers. For a flood, it is coming. Intensely mind-numbing. You fight for some air, and then quickly despair—for to darkness you’re slowly succumbing.” … wait, that’s not how that goes?! Weird… I guess that’s just the David Musser version…
📌 In This Edition…
Shorter (ish) newsletter this month. Shout out if you caught the song reference in this newsletter title.
- The Hard Stuff: Holding on through illness and losses
- Lessons from the Trümmerfrauen: Sometimes it’s one painstaking brick at a time
💔 The Hard Stuff
On the evening of August 30th, Katie’s co-worker passed away after a year-long battle with cancer. He was 48. His obituary paints a beautiful picture of the life of faith that he lived, with generosity and compassion and humor and service. He is survived by his wife and two teenage kids. Our whole family deeply grieved his passing.
At that same time, Izzie got sick with pneumonia. When Izzie gets sick, she needs care for 24 hours straight. Day after day. Sometimes from multiple people at once. So, the math gets a little wonky here, but it can look like 30 hours of care in a 24 hour window. It is relentless. It is exhausting. There are those moments where we are just too drained—we can’t do anything else to keep our eyelids open and she still isn’t SATing (oxygen levels) where she should be. It is, afterall, impossible to “sleep with one eye open” (I’ve tried), so we just fall asleep begging God for mercy, asking him to sustain her life through our sleep. Kids with trisomy 18 die from pneumonia. We haven’t felt that fear since she had RSV at the end of 2023, but we’ve become reacquainted with it this month.
After two brutal weeks, she finally recovered thanks to the antibiotics. But then a day or two later, ended up with yet another upper respiratory virus… We weren’t even recovered from the last hit and got hit again. Drat and double drat. Meds around the clock, slow feeds around the clock, coughing throughout the night, vomiting, crying—adjusting and readjusting the oxygen mask and pulse oximeter. Fighting to keep her hydrated and regulated. Her room becomes a hospital room. Respiratory therapy, nebulizing, sponge baths. Katie and I took turns “sleeping” in her room throughout the night. Which means we were often like ships passing in the night, one of us on our way to a nap, tapping out for the other to take over.
Smack in the middle of those bouts of illness, Katie headed to Dallas for a conference she’d been helping plan and organize all year. She wasn’t just behind the scenes—she also emceed the whole thing (and from all reports, she did an amazing job!). It was four days of long hours, lots of conversations, and, as Katie likes to say, “leaving it all on the court.”
When she got back, she told me, “This is the most exhausted I’ve ever been.” And honestly, who could blame her? Two weeks of Izzie’s pneumonia wrapped around putting on a conference and travel and craziness—only for her to land right back on the night shift within the week.
Turns out we had to give even more after we thought we were already fully depleted. It felt like we were already wrung dry, but life still asked for more. Kinda like squeezing water out of a soaked towel—you think you get it all, then re-twisty-wrap it a little tighter and somehow manage to squeeze out a few more drops.
Wow. When I imagined my life as a kid—I definitely thought it would have more zest—more spark—than wet towel analogies… I guess I did not turn out to be the Greco-Roman conqueror that I always assumed I’d become!
Needless to say, by mid September we were wrung pretty dry.
Then last week, my mom’s mom, “Grandmother,” was put on hospice and passed away late on Friday, September 19. That week was a flurry of activity. Unexpectedly hosting my parents and sister just a day after Katie got back from her conference. Katie and the girls and I visited Grandmother in the ER on Monday and had some sweet time together. Katie relieved my mom for most of Thursday, caregiving Grandmother, giving her sips of water through a syringe, changing her diapers, holding her hand.
My sister and I went in late on Tuesday to see her. I brought my guitar and got in trouble from the night nurse for singing too loudly. In the nurse’s defense, it was indeed 10PM… But Grandmother kept insisting I sing louder, regardless of the situation. I don’t think anyone can agree on anything anymore—but I believe we can all agree that you just don’t deny your dying grandparent! I told her I was trying not to make her neighbors mad at me and she strongly pressed on, “Oh they don’t care.” I told her she was gonna get me in trouble again and that angry nurse was gonna put me in jail. She was unconcerned for my innocent well-being. I played her some of her favorite hymns. We tried not to make her laugh too much because that would set off a flurry of pestilential coughing. But when she brought up being married for almost 68 years, I said, “Grandmother, that’s an awful lot of years of washing Grandfather’s undies!” Her cackles that followed were near-murderous indeed.
Grandmother was your quintessential grandma. Like, straight out of a story. Picture any storybook grandma and that’s pretty much her to a tee. Like, the grandma in The Gingerbread Man, for example! She loved to cook and bake and quilt and garden. She loved to play the piano and organ and sing hymns. She loved to eat fresh peaches from her orchard with vanilla ice cream. She was always up for adventure—whether canoeing or camping or biking or skiing or trips on her scooter visiting her family. She smiled all the time (up until the end). She hated to lose at Scrabble. She always won at mini golf. She loved to serve people and it crushed her at the end that she wasn’t able to serve anymore. She couldn’t stand getting doted on. As my sister put it, hugging Grandmother felt like being home. She was radiant. She was a light—warmth and beauty and joy and love. She will be dearly missed, though she is surely playing the organ for a heavenly choir of angels (and urging them to sing LOUDER no doubt!). What a joy that will be to witness one day. We love you, Grandmother.
With all the hard stuff this month, the return of The Great British Bake Off has been very timely indeed!
🧱 Lessons from the Trümmerfrauen
After World War II, millions of buildings across Germany lay in ruins, utterly devastated from Allied air raids. It is estimated that over half of the homes in Germany were either completely destroyed or severely damaged. Transportation systems, schools, factories—much of the nation’s infrastructure was left unusable. In total, an estimated 400 million cubic meters of rubble covered the country. In cities like Berlin, cleanup was projected to take decades.
At the same time, millions of German men had been killed or were prisoners of war. According to population records from 1945, there were about 7 million more women than men. As a result, much of the backbreaking work of clearing the rubble fell to the women of Germany and Austria. They became known as the Trümmerfrauen—the “rubble women.”
Although both men and women worked to clear the rubble, women were especially needed since there weren’t as many men left after the war. Most workers were between the ages of 15 and 50, and were often compelled by Allied orders to work. One rubble woman from Aachen recalled in 2006: “…it was mainly women who shoveled their way through the mountains of rubble in Aachen’s completely destroyed center; for a bowl of soup from the Americans, we spent the whole day chipping and carrying stones…” The work was grueling—demolishing ruins, salvaging bricks, and hauling debris—mostly without heavy machinery. They worked in all weather conditions, passing bricks from hand to hand in a chain of people.
The image of the rubble women became a powerful symbol of postwar recovery, (although historians note it has occasionally been romanticized or exaggerated, photos were sometimes staged). Still, their role was undeniably significant—the task was immense. Rubble women were central—both in reality and in legend—to the rebuilding of postwar Germany, embodying both necessity and resilience in the face of utter devastation.
Since I first learned about the Trümmerfrauen, I’ve been completely captivated. What sticks with me the most is that all that unimaginable devastation was cleared one brick at a time.
Maybe you know that feeling—not in a city leveled by bombs, but in your own life. Maybe something has exploded in your world: a sudden loss, an unexpected diagnosis, or the quiet grief of dreams that just don’t turn out the way you had hoped. Moving forward can feel unthinkable—impossible—or even hopeless.
Now, this may feel like a sharp turn, but stay with me: their story makes me think of Gideon in Judges 6. Let me set the scene. Israel had once again wandered away from God, so He allowed the Midianites to oppress them for seven long years. Really, they were bullies. They destroyed the crops, stripped the land bare, and “did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys.” Finally, the Israelites cried out for help. And into this bleak backdrop, we meet Gideon—one of my favorite characters in the Bible.
The story opens with the angel of the Lord sitting down under a tree where Gideon is threshing wheat in a winepress. Now, I don’t know much about threshing wheat—but given that particular detail, it’s quite possible that I know more about it than Gideon did!
I can almost picture the scene: Gideon’s dad standing at a distance, arms crossed, brow furrowed, watching the commotion under that oak with a look of utter disbelief—trying to recall if they had ever dropped Gideon down the stairs as a baby—or was he ever kicked in the head by a camel perhaps!? A neighbor ambles over with a similar quizzical expression, raises an eyebrow, and asks, “Joash, what in tarnation is your boy up to down there?!” Joash just sighs, shakes his head, runs his fingers through his beard and mutters, “Bless his heart… he tries so hard, you know…”
It does mention that Gideon was threshing wheat in the winepress to hide from the Midianites, so maybe he wasn’t just a dull crayon—maybe he was just plain scared. Still, I don’t exactly get Captain America vibes from this guy… Which is why I love the angel’s opening line: “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” Mighty warrior! Gideon probably did a double take—looked left, right, and left again—then slowly turned in a circle with his threshing fork, just to make absolutely sure the angel wasn’t talking to someone else. I imagine him pointing at himself and mouthing, “Who… me?”
Gideon essentially says, “Well, if the Lord is with us, then why have we been abandoned into the hands of the Midianites, blah blah blah…” And the angel’s response cuts straight through his excuses: “Go in the strength you have and save Israel out of Midian’s hand.”
Gideon—you know, the guy threshing wheat in a winepress—says, “but how can I save Israel? My clan is the weakest in Manasseh, and I am the least in my family.” Say what you will about the guy, but at least he was not oblivious to where he stood on the totem pole! Regardless, God meets him in his weakness. The task, felt hopeless. Moving forward was completely unthinkable. Which is why I love that line from the angel of the Lord, “Go in the strength you have.”
How can you possibly pick up the pieces in your life after such an unexpected catastrophe? More than likely, things will never go back to exactly the way they were before. But you can go in the strength that you have, and focus on moving one brick at a time. Eventually, you will look back and be floored by how far you have come.
As the Spanish poet, Antonio Machado wrote, “Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.” [Traveler, there is no road; you make your own path as you walk.] Keep moving forward, in the strength that you have, one brick at a time. (betcha weren’t expecting a combo lesson out of post-war reconstruction, Gideon, and Spanish poetry, Ha!)
Let me bring this thing all the way around and land the plane already.
God is a Redeemer and Restorer of broken things. He steps into brokenness and buys back what is lost (Ephesians 1:7). He doesn’t just rescue, he renews. He heals what is shattered, rebuilds what is ruined, and breathes life into dry bones (Ezekiel 37). Restoration isn’t just repair—it’s transformation into something whole and beautiful and new (Revelation 21:5). God is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18), he binds up wounds and carries burdens (Matthew 11:28). His heart bends toward those crushed by loss and grief and injustice.
Like the rubble women, God takes ruins—personal, relational, communal—and builds something stronger and truer and more beautiful out of them (Isaiah 61:3-4). Nothing is too broken for him to make new.
👷 A-Frame is A-Frame Indeed
One convenient byproduct of having my home-contractor dad back for an unexpected visit meant getting some help with the roof! (just in time for the wettest couple of days in the past few months!)
📖 Psalm 121
When we visited Grandmother on the Monday before she died, Ellie (8) brought along a card she had made for her. On it, she had carefully written out the opening verses of Psalm 121. When I asked her how she chose that passage, she said she had simply opened the Psalms, read it, and liked it. What none of us knew then was that Psalm 121 was Grandmother’s favorite. Just days later, it was read at her funeral. It gives me chills to see the Lord speaking to my daughter like that. Simply stunning.
1 I lift up my eyes to the mountains—
where does my help come from?
2 My help comes from the Lord,
the Maker of heaven and earth…
8 the Lord will watch over your coming and going
both now and forevermore.
🔭 Looking Ahead
Writing Goals for Next Month:
- Title and Subtitle confirmed
- AND Book outline completed
- Now it’s just time to make it happen!
- And hopefully there is no more pneumonia in October! 🤞
BTW, it’s my goal to release my book on Izzie’s 5th birthday, November 17, 2026. Circle the date on your calendar!
Thanks for being here.
With gratitude,
David
P.S. — A Funny Story To Close
I will leave you with this last story. Last week, Katie came in to Izzie’s room after a nap. She was leaning over and untangling her chords, very groggy, and checking her out. It looked like the folding chair next to the bed that I had been using was in the way, so I folded it up and moved it to the closet. While she was working with Izzie, she asked me to write down on her chart the time that she last gave her meds. So I walked back over to the closet and was writing down the time when I heard a CRASH. I turned around and Katie was on the floor, Izzie in her arms looking very dazed and confused. Her oxygen mask was askew on her forehead. Katie was a tangle of pulse ox chords and oxygen tubing and spit up cloths, looking even more dazed and confused than Izzie. I said, “What happened!? Did you trip on something??” She said, “Am I really this tired?? I thought I saw a chair here?!” She had just lifted Izzie out for some snuggles and sat back with all the confidence in the world. I rushed to her aid, good husband that I am, and lifted Izzie off of her and helped her to her feet and went over and got the chair and said she most definitely was indeed extremely tired because it was folded up the whole time by the closet… 🙊🤫
DAVID SCOT MUSSER 
