sadness/beauty/kindness

Yesterday I experienced sadness beauty kindness.

It's in taking the time to notice people and things around you that you truly live and you fully experience all the wonderful things that life has to offer, even the sad ones.

Sadness. I sat in a patients room and held her hand. Seventy-five years old and a bit confused. Her husband died last week and she lay there plaintively calling out the nurses. "I don't want to die. I'm going to die. My husband, he died. I'm all alone. I don't want to be alone." So something that isn't in my job description, something that I felt needed to be done. I put on the bright yellow isolation gown and latex gloves and sat on the chair beside her bed, holding her hand between my two hands, and she tried to speak to me in faulty and broken English that was jumbled with Italian. Almost completely incomprehensible. We'll come to that place at the end of our lives, where our mortality is staring us eye to eye, unavoidably in front of us, unable to dodge or ignore.
She asks me for a priest. "I have to make confession..." she trails off, as she closes her eyes and lays back on her bed. Her grip on my hand does not loosen; she does not want to be left alone.

Beauty. The snow flakes falling as I walked home from work were huge and soft, gently tumbling from the sky, frosting the sidewalks, roofs, streets and pedestrians, making everything look so much more beautiful, hiding the dirt and debris. Street lights reflected, glowing off the snow already on the ground, and when I looked closely, I could see the shadows of the snowflakes as they fell from the sky, just about to land on the ground. The shadows--so little and so many of them, reflecting the molecules floating around in the sky, making me realize how beautiful variations of the weather is, how much our eyes can see. Our eyes--our vision. We can see so much and we take it for granted. We glance quickly at things, never pausing to think about the fact that we're taking in so much colour, dimensions, shapes, textures...Windows to our soul, expressions of how we feel, capturing the life around of and permanently imprinting our brains with memories... Snow fell for a few hours and this morning the sidewalks were slushy and dirty, brown with mud and melted snow...but I remembered the magic of last night as I made my way home from work, enjoying the temporary peace that seems to blanket the city during a snowfall.

Kindness. And walking home through the snow, there is a man who has already industriously cleared away his sidewalk, shoveling the snow from his front path onto his yard. He has a bucket of salt and a little scoop and he tosses it onto his walkway.
He sees me coming down the sidewalk and quickly jumps out ahead of me and throws salt for me to walk on, smiling as he does so. "Thank you." I smile gratefully at him, enjoying the respite from slipping down the sidewalk.
Sometimes it seems like people don't know how to be kind to each other and those little acts of compassion or thoughtfulness are so rare, I hang onto them and treasure them. They mean a lot, because they demonstrate the kindness of a person's heart. We're all so caught up in doing our own things, enjoying the life for ourselves, and we lose sight of the fact that we're on this planet for a reason, placed in these situations for a purpose, relationships have been predestined and planned... So kindness can't be taken for granted and must be treasured and hopefully passed on. I'll try to think of something I can do that is kind and thoughtful...

All in all, Monday was a good day, with those strong emotions tumbling about in my head. As I walked down the apartment hallways, I thought to myself, 'I hope Eric is over tonight. It would be nice to have someone else around'. And I walk through the front door and he's sitting on the couch playing Skip-bo with S. We sat and talked, played some more games and ate food, and generally enjoyed the evening.

It really is the little things in life that will mean the most. The times spent with family and friends, laughing or crying, happy or sad, destitute or rich...I wish more of us could pause and come to that realization. This life, this is all we have. Make the most of it and take time to recognize sadness/beauty/kindness.

family

Sometimes I love my family/sometimes I hate them.

They can be frustrating, dogmatic, overwhelming, annoying, and outrageously negative. They criticize, critique, judge, and feel the need to voice an opinion on every single subject discussed.

Not only that---due to unfortunately choices between my parents and siblings, some of us aren't on good terms with my parents. We're talking but not easily, words a bit forced, certain subjects avoided, people generally unhappy with the way things are but neither side willing to give.

I know that who I am has been greatly impacted by my family, the people I have been surrounded with for years. Even though I don't live with my parents any more, I still find myself thinking a certain way or doing certain things that I know are habits instilled by them.

(Like only getting gas from Canadian Tire in order to the get back the Canadian Tire reward money. My dad seemed to live by that rule and now it's the only place I feel I should pump gas from.)

It's not necessarily a negative thing, being so profoundly impacted by the family around you. I feel lucky that we're not a family that has been quiet, tiptoeing about each other, everyone busy doing their own things and lacking the care for each other. Sometimes it feels like the other way around--people care way too much about each other's business. They need to learn to back off during certain moment...but there's pros and cons to everything.

Tonight though, S and I headed over to the family house to have supper with them and generally shoot the breeze. J is going to visit C in Asia for a month so we were wishing her well, taking time to talk to her before she leaves.

We sat down with several pots of Earl Grey tea and played Skip-bo, Phase 10, and Uno. We talked, laughed, made crude jokes, drank more tea, argued, played more games, laughed, lamented our poor luck at the games, listened to music, and generally carried on like so for a few hours.

S and I were talking about how we would be financially tight for the next couple months (due to our move coming up), and before we left my Mom gave us two bags of random groceries and said they were never going to use them. Of course they would have...tuna, cream of mushroom, spaghetti sauce, spaghetti noodles, Alphagetti...every one in the family would have consumed those things at one point or another, but that's my Mom for you...sometimes she seems ungenerous in her soul because she won't give or compromise regarding certain issues, but then she does something quietly like that, and we're struck anew at how gracious our parents are.

They must worry. They must worry about our eternal souls, our finances, our relationships that might drag us down, the fact that we don't go consistently to church, our physical sicknesses and needs...they must lay awake at night and wonder where we are and what we are doing, whether we are safe or in a potentially dangerous situation. Once you're a parent, you never stop parenting. You never shut off that concern and love for your child.

JM comes over to S and I laying on the kitchen floor wrestling with M. He kisses each of us on the cheek and M hugs us. There's so much love covering the house, and it should be able to flood through the discontent and frustration. The grace should reach past the disagreements and differing opinions.

How do we get so caught up in these petty squabbles and little things, that we forget how much we love each other? When did we grow up into these people that are loud, opinionated, and a bit malicious and hurtful to each other?

I know one thing for sure--the love that is so strong should be strong enough to reach to each other in times of hurt, fear, and confusion. Perhaps we just need to learn how to show ourselves better...perhaps we need to become more transparent with our individual lives instead of being so independent and separate. Who knows the answers. I do know that I love my family despite all the rage and sadness I might feel due to them.

I love them. The ties that bind us, the blood ties are stronger than anything in the world. We're connected through shared childhood experiences, through the jokes and the tragedies, through the easy and difficult learning, through everything...We're a family and we might hate each other sometimes, but we love each other all the time.