“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand small uncaring ways.”
Stephen Vincent Benét
January 2018 started off as any other year, except for two things.
What they don’t tell you about burying your father or your son is how it will change your perception of Life. A mother who buries her newborn no longer fears Death – he has done his worst to her already.
When 2018 started, I was pregnant with a baby who doctors feared may not survive and taking care of my sick father who doctors knew for a fact, wouldn’t.
As followers know, my baby entered the world, took a look around, and left after a week. My dad had left two months prior, peacefully dying in his sleep surrounded by his wife and children.
And so January 2018 would take the lead in being the worst year of my Life, ever, in the history of lives lived thus far. 2017 had come pretty close when both my boys, old and new, were diagnosed – one with Congenital Heart Defects and the other with Lung Cancer.
It is impossible to describe the feeling you get when you are told that someone you’ve known your whole Life will be leaving you soon, or that someone you’ve known less than a few weeks may also cross that bridge without you.
The gift of losing people is that we stop taking for granted the ones we haven’t lost yet. Yet…because make no mistake, atheist or agnostic, Christian, Hindu, Jew, or Muslim, science-based or not, everyone dies.
We go through Life believing in our own immortality. Of course, we’re going to be the ones who live forever, who tick off the bucket list and start a new one. We believe we always have more time to make changes, right wrongs, do better. But we aren’t and we don’t. This is what I learned this year.
If you’re not dead yet, and they’re not dead yet, you still have the opportunity to make amends. You still have a chance to tell people exactly how you feel. And unlike me who got lucky with being given the opportunity to love my two guys well before they parted, not everyone is going to announce that their departure is imminent.
While you still have Life inside of your organic body, you are able to decide for yourself how you want to spend the remainder of your time on Earth. Make positive changes in yourself and your environment. Changes start within us; in your mind, your heart, your essence of being.
If your Life is not safe, healthy, or happy – move. You’re not a tree. And until the day you actually are planted back into the ground to fertilize the Earth and feed the living, do whatever it takes to keep moving, keep living, keep praying, keep being.
Because you may not know this, but you are enough…
RAMBLINGS OF A DARK ANGEL 