LIFE, FEAR OF DEATH AND WHAT'S IMPORTANT
It didn't cost a thing!
As I laid in the operating room about to have my c-section, fighting anxiety and panic from the worry of "What if this is then end?", my mind goes over my life very quickly and what I have done and what I haven't done yet.
It's funny to look back on it now knowing that everything turned out good. But it's those things that ran through my mind that make me realize the best things in life are free and how true that saying is. It's not the cars you've owned or the clothes you've wore or even the house that you lived in that come to the front of your mind under these circumstances. It's the people you've known and the memories you have of those people in your life, rather they were there for your whole life or just a piece of it.
It's not really the fear of dying, it's the worry of wondering if you told those you loved how much they are appreciated. It's also the worry if you have given your children enough of you to be able to carry on without you and have the knowledge to do so successfully and if you have placed people in their lives that they can depend on after you are gone. But mostly they do they really know how much you love them and appreciate them.
When I thought back to the people I have known that have since left this world, the number is few as I have been lucky thus far in my life, I didn't think about what they did for me or what they bought me, no my mind thought about just the ordinary time we spent together.
I thought about my Grandma and how wonderful it was as a little girl just to sit and play cards with her and drink a coke and how special she made me feel just for spending that time with me.
I thought about my other grandparents and how I loved to spend the night with them and sit in the kitchen with my grandma and listen to her story of why her eyes went in different directions because of a cat or why her finger was bent crooked on the end or just sitting on the porch with my Papaw feeding "Peanut" his wild pet squirrel and then him trying to trick me into eating fried squirrel that my grandmother fried up after one of his hunting trips.
I thought about my Dad and how we used to have fun as a little girl just singing little songs together while driving or just playing a few rounds of "HORSE" in the backyard. Or how his sense of humor still to this day has me thinking sometimes for a few days until I "get" what the joke actually is.
I thought about my Mom that even though she can drive a person totally insane, she always has your back even if you're wrong and being as small as she is, would take on the Jolly green giant to fight for you if she has to.
I thought about my friends and my best friend Kathy that has been there for me since I was 14 and how our best times included sitting around her apartment with friends or singing in her car, neither of us had much money to do anything but it didn't matter because the best times we had didn't cost us a thing!
I thought about my husband, that was standing there beside me, those special times we had together and how he made it clear that our family was the most important thing in his life and no one would hurt any of us as long as he was there. Though we've only known eachother a fraction of our lifetime it was as if we have known each other our entire life. How we each enjoy having "special date day" and our "alone" time doing nothing but talking, as rare as it is, and how we still had many more moments to share in raising our four children and the one about to be born.
I thought about my kids and what they have given me. The smiles, the pride and the tears and so many stories to last a lifetime none of which cost me a thing!
While the list goes on & on, the one thing that stood out is the simple ordinary days that while everything is going great in our lives we over look and deem as trivial or unimportant. But these are the things that life is made of..... these are the things we miss when looking back. Not the clothes, gifts or material things, but the things that happened that didn't cost a penny.
No, I didn't lay on that table wondering about my e-mails, my job, the bills that needed to be paid or what I'd be buying someone for a birthday or Christmas, or how I never won the lottery or drove that high dollar car, no, I thought about how I would miss those plain ordinary moments of laughter and love that I had lived and those that I had yet to experience.
MY FAMILY
