I notice as I grow older, I lose all the various support persons I have had in my life.  As I told my daughter this week, it feels like my whole life is falling apart.  I've lost my Dad and 3 persons who were my main go to people at various times in my life and me for them in less than a year.  Many of the plans I'd made for retirement can't be carried out because these folks died.  The most recent death was one of the saddest for me because life had separated us in different ways and I'd lost proximity to her because I lived where I do and she lived where she did.  It was my intention, once I knew that I would not be able to care for my Dad in Assisted Living that I would be able to go and spend more time with her in her new nursing home that I last knew about.  I had tried to phone her at different times in the past year or so and also sent her cards but hadn't gone to see her in the last place I knew her to be in because Dad's AL facility was miles away from hers.  I only had so much time to devote and had to choose which person I could spend the time with.

Finally, I recognized that I had the time and energy to go and visit her and spend time with her.  I called her CP #, the one she liked me to call and the message was that she was not accepting calls at this time.  I called the last place she had been staying to leave a message for her that I would be travelling to spend time with her in the next few days.  They told me she'd been discharged and they didn't know where she was.  I check obits on a hunch and found her.  My heart stopped.  My friend, the mother I had who could do what my mother couldn't do when I was a young Mom myself and a bosom buddy to me for more than 33 years died almost a year ago and I didn't know it.  The knowledge cut like a knife because I would have been there or think I would have been there to at least honor her and bless her children at the funeral with all the ways I knew their Mom and what she had done with me and for me and my children and many other people.

Facts were, I didn't know.  I was grieving as if she had died the day I found her obit.  And remembering back to this same time last year, I might not  have been truly able to be there because of the other priorities in my life at that time.  I shared my friend's death with my daughter and I shared about her death with a friend who is in her 80s who I have joked with at times about she and her husband needing to set up an office in a local funeral home because they are there so much.  My friend shared with me that it will keep on coming and that many more will die at a quicker rate as I continue to age.  She helped me remember that today really is all that we have to celebrate our lives and the lives of our loved ones.  Tomorrow doesn't always come.  The past is over.  If I think I'll be kinder tomorrow, I'm fooling myself.  If I think I'll do something I want to do - tomorrow - I'm robbing myself.  If I don't make the most of being present to a person in love and understanding when I'm with them because there is plenty of time to get to that, I'm missing the only time I might have with that person, NOW.

My second Mom was a woman with flaws just like the rest of us; she was also a woman with a huge heart who was beat up as a child by her brothers and not supported by her Mom who blamed my friend for the abuse.  What my friend did was to forgive herself, her family members, her husband who died at 38 of kidney failure leaving her to raise their two young children on a secretary's wage and to do her best to be a mentor and a nurturer for both men and women.  If she got mad at anybody her way to handle it was to "kill them with kindness."  She was also the only person I can remember back then who was honest enough with me to say the hard things that I might not like to hear and helped me trust her, too.  She didn't come out of right field with her honesty that was hard for me to hear - she spent a long time working an developing a friendship between us first and then zoned in on my defects .  I really didn't like her when I first met her because she poked at every defect I had just by being herself and wouldn't buy any excuse I would make for why I wouldn't do something to help myself through some pretty difficult situations. But life kept bringing us together and I would find her to be one of the most nurturing but also honest women I could be blessed to know.  I knew that if I asked her an honest question about her experience of me, she would give me an honest although sometimes a risky for her reply.  She loved me that much.  To risk herself in telling me what she saw that wasn't all that great if I asked and sometimes when I didn't ask, too. 

I am grateful to her for being herself and for loving me.  I can hear her now as I say to her humbly how much I regret not being able or choosing to be with someone else rather than her before, during or after her death:  "Don't be an a**.  Get out there and do for another what you would have liked to do for me." 

-- Edited by grateful2be on Sunday 14th of September 2014 10:37:23 AM