Before Mark’s death, I was a frequent contestant in the If That Were To Happen Me game. This is where someone throws out a tidbit of a life event and you fill in the blank. Sometimes it could be fun like spending mega millions from a lottery win or living abroad for a year. The food! The wine! The scenery!
More often than not, though, it is a more dire circumstance – death of a spouse, death of a child, a devastating diagnosis, making a decision about life support, an aging parent who cannot safely live on their own, an unwanted divorce, someone you love who is an addict, a fractured relationship beyond repair. The only rule of the game is that you have zero life experience with said topic which makes it obvious that you know exactly what the next right thing is to do. But what happens when life does hand you one of those circumstances, when you can no longer play the game you were so good at when nothing was at stake?
The summer Mark died was the same summer a dear friend’s husband was losing his life to cancer. They were taking a family vacation a few hours away from us and we drove down on a Sunday to meet them for the day. All of it was so normal – the conversations, the laughter, the ease of being with long-time friends, and yet crushingly sad. How I would glance at Jim and plead with the universe that he was too good to take. How I wanted to take him aside and promise him that I would be there for his wife, but every practiced conversation in my head got stuck in my throat. Little did I know then that my own husband was going to beat him to the other side by eleven days.
Three weeks after that visit there would be a horrific boating accident on the same lake we had been on when a duck boat would venture out in questionable weather that quickly became life threatening. Seventeen people on board would die, five of them children, who became trapped inside the boat. One woman who managed to escape with her nephew lost nine family members that day. The story was national news for many days and I watched in horror. We were just there. Five children? An entire family gone? How is this possible? I texted Carla. Did you see this? Can you even imagine? Two months later I would learn in my own life that everything can change in the blink of an eye and there is no going back from the edge of that.
We are all lousy contestants in the game of pretending we would know exactly what to do when life upends all that we cherish, though, we like to believe that is not the case. The chasm between what if and what now is too big to cross with any certainty save for those who got pushed to the side that was just fiction until it wasn’t.
And on that side the only thing we have figured out is that we are here and we have keep going.
I needed to read this Today . Your truth
When you write really can touch my heart and make me remember to take our lives one day at a time. And never take anything for granted . ❤️ J&T
Kathleen, I love your writing. It always makes me think.
Do you still play the What if game? I don’t think I ever have. . .
I can only say that you embody the grace and strength that I hope I can measure up to when I have to fill in the blank.
Kathy, when we were in high school, my friends and I had a saying: “Keep on keeping on.” I took it for granted as just a saying until Steve and I ran into various adult complications of life. From our sessions of working out problems, making decisions, etc., it suddenly hit me. We were in the throes of some issue, and he said, “You just never give up, do you?” It took me back to those weird teenage days, when it seemed like we just had to keep going forward. I will never give up trying to be a better friend, a better listener, a better sister, a better whatever, because this is our one shot, isn’t it? And I love that reading your words brings back basic truths that are always here, but slide into the background during whatever we call life.