Happy Sunday Everyone:
Many of you that I’m close with have heard me talk about my 102 year old Grammie. Her lessons learned in her long life and me interviewing her for her 100th birthday was certainly one of the most popular posts with this group. So Grammie is nearing her end on this earth. The doctors found some stuff that would suggest a very short time period. She’s still at home, she’s still totally lucid, she still sits in her anti-gravity chair, she still has every wit about her. She’s tired, and she’s shrinking, but she’s still totally positive, which make it that much harder to say goodbye. I flew down a few weeks ago, I’m sitting there, 44 years old, weeping like a baby, and she’s telling me how much she loves her whole family and she has no fear about what is to come and only gratitude for what has been. As she’s departing, she’s still creates a shocking peace when you’re around her, or even thinking of her.
Things got bad for her last week and she made the conscience decision to stop eating and to stop drinking, it was time to go. She laid down prepared to not wake up. The next day to her utter shock she was still alive. My dad was talking to her and she said “Tom, I opened my eyes and thought “oh my, I’m still here, so let’s see what happens today”. She got out of bed, went out in front, had a lite lunch, a glass of wine, and had some friends/family over to visit with. My dad’s telling me the story, and we’re both just looking at each other laughing and smiling and I’m thinking “can you imagine if that’s what your mindset was every day?”.
I’ve talked about the clichés’ of this world before, and I’ll not go into them here but it’s fun when you can put your own life examples against them, they become that much more real, present, and powerful. Can you imagine if you could open your eyes every morning with the non-expectation of it being a given. Can you imagine if you opened your eyes every morning and thought “oh my, I’m still here, so let’s see what happens today”. It would be a pretty awesome way to go through the rest of our lives. This is big picture stuff, I get that, .but one thing for sure, the odds of having that type of enlightenment is only going to happen with practice and awareness. I have a long way to go but I’d rather having a starting point than no point.
My Grammie will always be teaching me how to live life. I’ll leave you my favorite question to her and her answer back….in her own words.
Me: “What advice would you give your younger self?”
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Grammie: “Put forth your best effort in all that you do. Have faith that all is turning out for the best, no matter how it may look on the surface at the time. Sometimes we find out later that something else that developed was better.”
Have a great week ahead, and keep it all in perspective.