DEATH

What experiences in life helped you grow the most?

I talk to the stars because I believe that is where all souls go after they pass. They’re still close enough to see so I know they’re OK. 

It is the cycle of life and death? It is the experience never chosen, death? It’s in the vast nighttime sky deep into the abyss and past the known solar system? Gone forever.

Watching my mother-in-law, gasping for her last breath after her brain had forgotten everything else due to Alzheimer’s. I lay with her in bed, holding her as tight as I could, knowing that any of her brats could be her last secretly wish and hoping that was her last breath every time because it was, incredibly agonizing for me so I can’t imagine what it was like for her. I finally said look there’s not he’s on a cruise and he’s waiting for you. Once she saw her husband and she jumped right over to the cruise ship. Leaving her agony behind, I swear, as the cruise ship pulled away from the dock, she was waving and smiling at me. I know as her caregiver I did everything I could. In the end dementia won.

It opened my eyes to the world to see how small I really am. In a way I felt like I was 99 years old but then again I felt like my life was mine to live as I chose.