Dear Alex, Turn around and Face Tomorrow...
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| Look what's arrived!!! Hospital bed for Alex!!! Surrounded by kids' drawings and photos, brilliant! |
18th December 2012
Dear Alex,
Turn around and face tomorrow…
There’s people gone, there’s children dead. There’s misery there’s
sorrow there’s brokenness and a broken world and hearts torn apart.
We hear something devastating, it changes us for a while, a few days,
weeks stretching to months sometimes, and we feel more grateful for what we
have. Appreciate the little things…
Then life bowls on, our own grizzling tired kids over excited and
bickering, late on the school runs, dinner burned and milk spilt, bills piling
in and arguments with our partners. Work is hard, we’re not paid enough for all
we do…where’s the justice we cry, our hearts blackened by striving, eyes fogged
with life’s drudgery and we quickly have lost that eureka moment. That moment
when we felt the loss, felt sorrow and compassion and looked at our lives
through grateful eyes…
The end of this year has brought me so much sad news. Not just the
deaths of those innocent kids gunned down in a Primary school. I’ve heard of
acquaintances dying, young, two fathers, a mother.
I went to bed just bawling again last night. Flashbacks of the you that
you were. I lay awake and realised several things. If we look at things from a
grateful platform, we look at the beauty in our lives:
If you’d given me the choice, Alex to die on the operating theatre, or
deal with everything that I have to be dealing with (and it is relentless and
feels futile often) actually, I’d have bitten your arm off to have the life I
have now and for you to still be here and I would have said that id have done
it all, a thousand times over.
And no, I don’t want a hospital bed in my dining room, meaning there’s
no space downstairs, and no I don’t want a stranger in my house whom I have to
feed and be around all Christmas day and night, because you need (15 months
down the line) still, 24/7 care. Yes, I’d change all this in a split second to
have you back as you were. BUT, place myself on that grateful platform, change
that perspective, and WOW! That I get to have you home at Christmas, that we
get to sleep under the same roof for the first time in 15 months. So there’s
someone we don’t know in the house, I’d like to know where their family is,
maybe it’s a godsend for them they get to be around a family at Christmas?
I just can’t stop thinking this morning that I am so, so lucky you are
still here. And it’s given me that perspective back, that energy I was lacking
in with grief-swollen eyes.
Because as I observed the other day, if I spend my whole life thinking
‘things will be better when…’ then I will never enjoy life as it is, for what
it is its rich tapestry of sorrow and happiness, tears and saturating joy.
For me, 2013 is going to be a year where I work harder than ever at
being happy in the present. Living in the moment because the next might not
come! Every time I feel my feet slipping off that platform as life’s rubbish
pulls me down, I will fight tooth and nail to rest on my grateful step…
I challenge you all to do the same! Don’t let the sad events change you
for a while, let them change you forever.
Me xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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