Don't give up...no matter what.
When my mother died in 2004 I simply gave up in many aspects of my life. Not on Kathi or the children, but for some reason I didn’t care about myself anymore. Now, I understand how this is detrimental to Kathi and the kids, because I’m a husband and father. Yet something in me ‘broke’ and I don’t know how to fix it.
At the end of 2006 I had a minor stroke and have had intense chest problems ever since, with increasing shocks of overwhelming stabs into the left side of my skull. Enough to knock me over and shut down my left eye for a few minutes.
Last night I woke up and after a while, started to cry.
Mortality set in with a fierceness I’ve never experienced before. Kathi lay next to me silent as can be as tears ran down my face, thinking of my children, of all my mistakes and wrong choices in life. The things you wish you never had to experience, or worse…the things you wish to God Almighty you could take them back and save a broken heart…or twelve. The only thing I have done of any worth is marry Kathi and have those incredible children. The rest I seem to screw up no matter what I do. That’s what it feels like, anyway.
I woke feeling very humbled this morning.
All I can do is start from where I am, right here, right now.
I know that’s all anyone can do, but it just feels so…not enough.
Here’s to walking the path of another day and hoping you end up in the right pace at its end.
Ok, I’m done being a big baby…
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…..accepting what is.
My response to this post would be best expressed by just looking you in the eyes, nary a word uttered. Sometimes words and talk strike me as violations of the natural order of things, as sins, and so on.
I’m stopping. I just spent nearly an hour playing with words, realizing I have no idea how many wakes and funerals I’ve attended starting when I was 7 yo. Too much tragedy. My father died about 20 years ago from alcoholism at the age of 59. He was a good man who took some wrong turns. My mother would wake me up starting in my early teens put a baseball in my hand and instructed me to let my father in. I never understood the reason for the bat. When he got drunk he went after her and some of my younger siblings. I had no contact with him during the 7 years before he died. We didn’t have many good father-son times—though the few I remember were such blessings. He was so tortured I prayed for his death. Curiously, I have become so much closer to me in the years following his death. I miss him. He taught me many important lessons and showed me I could accomplish whatever I set my mind to as long as I was willing to endure the loneliness and the very long hours to make it happen.
I’ve lived to see virtually every dream I ever had come to life…….and lived through each of my worst nightmares.
I know my version of dealing with my mortality, shaking my head in disbelief at everything I’ve lost, held my head in shame for my failures and mistakes, realizing I have never gone to bed feeling like I accomplished what needed doing, living with the fact I could not protect my children from a devastating divorce, feeling so very flawed, —-worst of all knowing how much time I missed with my kids when they were young as I worked myself too close to death.
I don’t think my kids—22 and 19—the greatest gifts in my life-view things, see me as I see myself. We have experienced Heaven and Eternity together—literally. I have no right to have been blest as I have with them.
I’m honored to be alive. I intend to dream another long list of sacred dreams into reality and be available to my children teaching by how I live, being a rock on which they can depend.
Jamie, you are a good man, a good husband, a good father. Maybe you honor your wife and children by allowing yourself to see you and feel toward you the way they do.
If you do this—–it will be the greatest gift you can give them and this business of “not enough” will disappear.
I just read the words of a man rather than a boy. I hope you never stop being what you mistakenly call “being a baby”. It takes more than a little courage to walk the path you are on.
Walk in balance. Things are working out. Time to wake up from the bad dream.
It will be a good day