Live in the moment, before it's gone

Life is fleeting. It is a constant theme of the last two and half years of my life. The further away from the fog I get the more I am able to recognize that. This past holiday was extremely difficult for my family with my parents almost dying from COVID-19. The holiday season was a stark reminder of their age and their mortality. As they continue to recover, although I don’t think they will ever be the same, I have found that the moment I chose to release the anger I had towards them the more humanity they have. I had spent so much time seeing them as wrong, as perpetrators of pain towards myself and my siblings that I had almost lost sight of the fact that they too are human beings, making them imperfect, fallible just like the rest of the world. My expectations for them perhaps were not congruent with their abilities and while I have learned the hard way that we can have empathy and compassion for one’s experiences we cannot excuse bad behavior. That revelation is how I have been able to maintain healthy boundaries with them and continue having a relationship that is healthy for me and my children.

My best friend’s father passed away this past weekend. I can only imagine how difficult this experience is for her and her family as they navigate this life without their father, husband, grandfather, friend, and brother. An unexpected passing that shook their world in a way that is forever changed. Loss does that. It shakes up your world when you least expect it. We can prepare ourselves for loss, see it coming even, but when it happens it is as if we never even saw the possibility. Funny, how the human mind works. It has the possibility to protect us until it knows not what to do with the pain and we get slapped with the stark reality that nothing in life is permanent and if you miss opportunities, you can’t get them back. I believe that is the beginning stages of grief, the replaying of happy or not so happy moments in your mind or the acknowledgement that there will be no more memories to be had. Either can be extremely painful and if we don’t hold space for ourselves, we will judge how fast or slow we move through the stages and in what order. Grief is not linear, it ebbs and flows and as long as we remind ourselves of that, all will be easier to tolerate, eventually.

I have been reading a tremendous book about C-PTSD. It is a first-hand account from someone diagnosed later in her life and working diligently to find a healing space to show up from. It truly has been an eye-opening experience for me as I navigate my own trauma and as I continue on my journey towards understanding her. I imagine at some point I will eventually stop the pursuit of understanding someone who is no longer in my life. I imagine eventually I will apply my learnings about myself and about human behavior towards a relationship in which I can actively engage in but for now I owe it to myself to continue to better understand how everything unfolded and why. I am committed to not repeating patterns both of what were generationally programmed in my DNA and those behaviors that I continued to employ before I knew how damaging they were. How I didn’t realize how damaging it was to implement similar practices as those that had been so detrimental to me is beyond me but I what I am committed to now is to operate from a place that allows healthy interactions to exist, to allow healthy parenting to be provided, and to be cognizant of my own stuff before I enter into battle with someone from my ego rather than my wise mind. A place I am working very hard to stay firmly planted in, since I can help it.

Life has been surreal at times especially these last few months. I get these waves of emotions that at times I do not know what to do with it. The best way I can classify them is like flashbacks or like these moments where I realize the reality of things that have happened or won’t happen. One example is that the day before my niece’s 6th birthday it will be 6 months since I last saw her. I often don’t know what to do with my feelings or these revelations but they stop me dead in my tracks. Fortunately, those snippets only happen every so often but when they do, they make me sad. So deeply sad. The finality of things makes me realize how much actually ended when we did. It wasn’t just the relationship that ended it was the dreams that we shared that ended too.

Grief is a distinctly unique experience and as I head to stand side by side with my best friend to say her final goodbyes to her father, I hope to be able to support her in the ways she needs, to embrace her with love and support as she struggles with this most difficult time. Life is short, at 42 with all of these recent deaths, it is becoming even more and more abundantly clear that I can’t put off things for tomorrow that I can do today because I may not have tomorrow. Carpe diem.