Should I have died by now?

What a question for me to honestly ask of myself. I look in the mirror and see a face and body that has evolved a long way since I first hit that low point of 115 and was told that I had less than 2 weeks to put myself together for a rather long and unique end of life journey. Wow! How much has happened since then.

Perhaps the most difficult to comprehend was the passage of so many others. Perhaps, Chuck Bussey was my biggest shock. As I look back I would call it a more than life relationship. We didn’t have much time together. We had a friendship that kept work in it’s proper relationship, but then beyond that we had a sense that there was more to life than just work, we shared a sense of the importance of our families within the importance of many other things, a sense of the uniqueness if the past, but yet room for still more. I could go on, but I’ll leave it there – there was a comfort that in a short relationship in this life I would be uniquely remembered by him in this relationship of the future. Shortly before his death he sent me a copy of his brother’s award winning book of poetry. I keep it at bedside. He was very proud of his brother, as I sensed his brother was of him. Their sensitivity with the meaning of words and the words of our language was an education in itself for me.

There were many others. Some I re-found from the early days, but from friendships that had never been severed, just traveled down different paths. At my 50th reunion from high school I listened in amazement from a slice out of life from the Seinfeld series. A classmate, Mancuso, told me about a race between he and I that I had never remembered. There was one spot still open on the Penn Relays Mile relay team. Our coach arranged for a run off between he and I for that position. Mancuso said that he led for the entire race until the last few seconds when I swept past him for the slot. The Penn Relay’s were the most sought after of all trips available to us. What he never knew was I wasn’t sure if I could even come up with the few cents necessary to meet at our central departure place together.

God has been good to me these past two years. I have had to ask myself – what about all the others who have been so good to me? Kris and the kids who have been through so much every single day without relent, friends who have never asked for escape from our friendships, the new friends and acquaintances who are always willing to step in and help. My repayment has been meager. I pray with them and share my pain with them. I am sort of blessed by my hands. My hands are uniquely scarred and blood damaged. At first, I was so proud that my hands were clear and unmarked, but soon the ugliness sneaked in and I was reminded daily that within me there was an illness that was not easily going to relinquish its grip on my life and in the end would be the victor after taking its share every day. The fight was on and would not cease until the very end.

I’m going to bring this to an end but not without first reminding you that there are many others in your midst who right now – aware or unaware may be more ill than I am at this moment. We are all His children and worthy of his love. I remember you all every day and ask the same of you. Be good to each other – share the good things of your lives together with each other. Don’t focus on the negative aspects of your lives, but on the wonders and the gifts of such wonders and such blessings that you have been gifted with. Plan today how you might make another’s just a little more memorable. Take care. Last night , Halloween, I sat in my wheelchair outside, in the dark, at the top of my driveway, and as I froze my bottom off I thought of how blessed I was to say trick or treat and then wonder was that my line or was it the kids = what did it matter – we all smiled and laughed and it made for a nice Halloween.