59

As a 20 year old mortality isn’t one of the first things on your mind. Even when faced with challenges like a car accident or falling off a printing press (neither one I recommend doing). Mortality is one of those things you don’t think much about till you face the death of a loved one or witness the birth of your first child. 

 My first real look at mortality didn’t happen till I lost my dad. Months after his death I would sleep on my mom’s couch while my daughter attended school down the street. We could have easily put her in the school near our home, but it seemed to put mom at ease having us there. But the years passed and mom and ourselves got on with our lives. Then in the mid-nineties we moved some 130 miles away to begin a new adventure. 

 As the 2000’s approached others that meant so much to us passed: Perry, Mrs. Mary, Mr. Julian, and Grandma. Then wounds cut deeper with the passing with my mother-in-law Kathy and my own mother. It was through those hard years that mortality began to weigh on my mind a little more. 

 Just before Christmas 2014 our youngest daughter announced she was pregnant. For whatever reason that wonderful news really weighed on me. To a point it showed me point blank that the world didn’t spin around me. That no matter the end game of my own mortality, the world was going to keep spinning. It took a little while, but that melancholy mood did go away, only to rear its ugly head a few months later. 

 The final year of my graduate program things were not going well. I ended up with two extended hospital stays. The first was because of an irregular heartbeat, which you think would have taught me a lesson in stress management. Then nearly a year later came the big one. While struggling to finish up my Capstone exams I noticed I had some major acid reflex. This persisted right up to and beyond me completing all the exams. The problem was my self-diagnosed ended up being a full-blown heart attack that damaged a nice chuck of my heart. 

 That was a little over six months ago. In this time my doctors are satisfied I’m making “improvements” in my lifestyle. But for me personally, I learned that all the worrying and stressing I did to maintain “control” wasn’t worth-a hill-of-beans. Because despite my fighting and scraping at some point 59 is going to come. If you’re curious about what 59 means, it’s the age my parents were when they both passed 12 years apart. 

 I don’t wish for this to end up sounding like some morbid epitaph to the memory of my parents. I suppose what I am trying to say is live. None of us are guaranteed a tomorrow, so the best thing we can do is live our fullest today. By allowing yesterday be in the past and letting tomorrow to worry about itself. We can live our best lives now.  

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