I'LL WATCH YOU LIKE A HAWK

It’s winter here in the Northeast. Some people would say that the snow is beautiful, especially when it falls.  Some people enjoy standing at the top of a mountain in the freezing cold and skiing their way down the mountain, with the wind in their face as their face turns numb from the cold.  Others, like me, prefer sitting at the edge of the ocean, enjoying the music of the waves, the strength of the sunlight and the softness and warmth of the sand. The strength of the warmth of new life and new beginnings will triumph over the frozen cold.

With the anticipation of spring, I know that it is time for me to share this story with others. My hopes are that anyone else that is faced with similar circumstances in their life will look to what happened to my family and realize that others have gone through a similar experience and that yes, one does survive and the human sprit does endure. It is time to clean out the old clothes, the old crystal, and the old furniture. Time to part with those items and time to get my basement and my garage back. But the memories are in my heart, and it is those memories that I wish to share.

Sometimes in life we are not fortunate enough to realize how lucky we are to have people in our lives until after they are gone. That is certainly the case between my parents and I. Those that are always in our lives we take for granted. We take for granted their strengths, their weaknesses and even their stubbornness. And then one day they, their personalities are gone. Sometimes this happens very suddenly; in a short period of time and sometimes it is a grueling process that calls upon hidden emotional strengths that people never knew they had to cope with their ongoing illness until they cannot fight any longer.

For me, the death of my father was the greatest lesson he ever taught me. My father taught me how one should face death, meet death and ultimately die. My mother taught me how sometimes you want death, but death is illusive and evades you. During the course of my mother’s illness, many times I prayed for her death and I know that she, the stroke victim, also prayed for her death but she could not tell me that she was doing so. Yet many times late at night when I could not sleep I would wrestle with the idea of the value of life versus euthanasia and throughout this entire ordeal, the value of life won. In my opinion, and we are all entitled to our opinions, the value of life was the right decision. I have purposely evaded the term “quality” of life. Years ago, my intelligence believed in the sexy sounding term of art of “quality of life”, but I never knew what that meant. I have concluded that the time I spent with my mother in her last days, even though some would deem it not a good quality of life, was invaluable time that taught me many lessons, gave me memories that I am still holding on to and showed me an inner strength that I never thought I had. 

Yet death is such an ugly word. The word has such finality about it, such a connotation of an ending, the closing of the door, the end of the line. But we have to believe, and I know that I believe, that death is not the end, it is just a new beginning. Years ago, people would refer to the event as “passing on”. As a child, I could never understand why that term was used when someone died. “Where were they passing on to?” I used to ask, “They’re going to a better place”, would be the answer. And that’s what I have to believe. Seeing someone suffer through a catastrophic illness, to have the basic bodily functions that we take for granted pulled away from them in an instant made me realize that life does not end that way, that there is something better waiting for us and that life just continues after death, but in a different form that we do not know of.

So with all this, I desire to share this story with you. I think that it is important to talk about their lives so that you can get to know the people involved. It becomes important that you know the values and convictions that my parents had, so that you can more readily understand the people and ultimately the personality that a stroke changes. I hope I do not make you sad with this story. You will see that during this ordeal, emotions were high and low. Even though the stroke was devastating, there were still happy times, sad times, many laughs and many tears. I hope to show you how emotion is stronger than intelligence. I hope to show you that no matter what you accumulate in wealth, you cannot take it with you no matter how much you try. And I hope to show you that above all, life is a circle. Our parents try their best to take care of us when we are younger, to bring us up right, to give us what they did not have. But the time comes in our life when we have to give that back, especially as they get older, frail and fragile. Do not resent having to do that, if you find yourself in that position you are fortunate. There will be a great reward for you in a place better than this.