Rethinking Possible

A Memoir of Resilience

Rebecca Faye Smith Galli

• Publisher: She Writes Press
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781631522215
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Rebecca Galli grew up believing in the power of having a plan. Raised in a loving southern family by a deep-thinking pastor father and an ever-positive, devoted mother, she imagined a future shaped by faith, family, hard work, and stability. But when her seventeen-year-old brother was killed in a waterskiing accident, the carefully ordered world she trusted began to unravel.

Over the years, Becky faced one devastating challenge after another: her son’s degenerative disease and death, her daughter’s autism diagnosis, separation from her husband, and finally, just nine days after her divorce was finalized, the onset of transverse myelitis, a rare inflammation of the spinal cord that left her paralyzed from the waist down.

Yet Rethinking Possible is not simply a memoir about tragedy.

With warmth, humor, honesty, and unwavering faith, Becky shares what it means to keep loving, adapting, and living fully even after life no longer resembles the future you once imagined. As a disabled parent raising two children with disabilities while navigating profound grief and physical loss, she discovered that meaning and possibility can still exist within ever-changing limits.

At its heart, Rethinking Possible is a story about the power of love over loss—and the choices we make when life veers far from our plans. For anyone navigating heartbreak, caregiving, chronic illness, disability, grief, or unexpected change, this memoir offers something rare: grounded hope that does not deny pain, but refuses to be defined by it.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Prologue: What’s Planned Is Possible
• Chapter 1: The Accident
• Chapter 2: Forest
• Chapter 3: A Family Shattered
• Chapter 4: A Marriage of Winners
• Chapter 5: Family Again
• Chapter 6: Miscarriage
• Chapter 7: Undiagnosed Disease
• Chapter 8: Expect Obstacles
• Chapter 9: When Hope Hurts
• Chapter 10: When Winners Fail
• Chapter 11: The Closure Party
• Chapter 12: One in a Million
• Chapter 13: A Useless Master’s Degree
• Chapter 14: Finding My Words
• Chapter 15: Pain Is Inevitable
• Chapter 16: The “C” Word
• Chapter 17: Rejected Again and Now Replaced
• Chapter 18: Dark Days
• Chapter 19: Acceptance Changes Everything
• Chapter 20: Farewell to My Father
• Chapter 21: Saying Good-bye to Mom
• Chapter 22: Losing Matthew
• Chapter 23: The Wedding
• Chapter 24: Facing Fear Again
• Chapter 25: The Greatest of These
• Chapter 26: The Empty Nest
• Epilogue: Rethinking Possible
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author