Last week every time I turned around I heard another horrific story about death, dying, and on the verge of dying. It reached the point that I was afraid to start a conversation with anyone! It was horrible!
At a holiday party on Saturday everyone was asked to state something they were thankful for. I didn’t have to think for a moment, I’m thankful my family is healthy!! And, I’m praying we all stay that way!!
When you think about it, it’s pretty amazing what a human body and spirit can endure. Not only endure, but come back from. How, as a specie, we seem to be predisposed to overlook, overcome, and move past the most awful things and grow. This isn’t the first time I’ve made this observation, but it still catches at times and humbles me.
As most of you know my son was severely wounded while deployed in Iraq. He lost his left leg and nearly died. At the time, his wounds and rehabilitation was all consuming, but now I hardly ever think about it and I’m always a little surprised when someone asks me how my son is doing. I have to stop a second to remember what they are talking about. He’s great, at least when he isn’t ticking me off.
One of the stories I heard recently was about a family where the wife (44) died unexpectedly, then the husband (44) died of cancer, the cat died of cancer, and father died of a heart attach, all within one week. The mother is left behind and grief stricken as you can imagine, but at some point in the future she and the rest of the family will move past all this, as inconceivable as that seems to them now.
I caught a part of a show over the weekend about the trade in sex slave in the U.S. Not my usual sort of viewing, but as I listened to this one young woman talk about her experiences and the absolute horror and terror she lived through day after day, I kept thinking how can she still be sane, and how does someone get over that? How does she go on to live a normal life? Yet there she was doing just that.
When I worked in North Portland, I met an older gentleman who was always so pleasant and cheerful. You would have thought he had lived a charmed life, and I think he would have told you that he had. I found out later that he was a survivor of the Bataan Death March, the only member of his military team to survive. None of it showed on him.
As humans we are amazing creatures. I wonder what it is in us that allows us to not only survive such awful events, but to grow beyond them. Without this ability I’m sure humans would be long since extinct by now.
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