So about the elf............

So about the elf...........  Google "elf on the shelf."  What you'll find is a new tradition.  Based on a 2005 book by Carol Aeberold and Chanda Bell  that answers the question of how does Santa know if you've been bad or good?  We know from songs that he sees you when you're sleeping, he knows when you're awake...  But HOW does he know?   I dunno what I thought when I was a kid.  Not knowing was part of the magic.  And being threatened that Santa was watching and that I'd better be good for goodness sake was a very real, very effective threat.   In my house it's only a few days after Halloween and I'm already wondering if it's too early to start that threats.   It turns out that Santa knows how you're behaving because his elves tell him.  Some elves are his secret spies (that's where my ninja idea comes from and I'll get to that in a few days.)   Your elf on a shelf who you adopt and get to name  comes to live in your house right after American Thanksgiving (which to Canadians would seem like some random day.  Otherwise known as "the day after the parade day."  Or "the day the Americans get the good shopping deals and we have to wait until Boxing Day for them and that doesn't seem fair."  If you're an American reading this go Google Boxing Day)   to see if you've been bad or good.  Then he flies  back to the North Pole each night and reports to Santa.  I haven't read the $25.00 book myself, (now available as a girl and with a video)  but from the 86,000,000 entries on the internet that's what I gather.  I like elfs.  I used to be their boss.  Some of you may remember that back in the day I worked as the set supervisor for the Santa set at the local mall.  I was Mrs. Claus and I used to be in charge of hiring elves.  It turns out that good elves are hard to find.  Much bettter to audition them than to interview them.  So I guess I'm into elves.  Or if not "into" then at least I have an appreciation for elves.  How many right minded moms can say that??????????

I'm baaaaaaaaaack! Did you miss me? Yeah probably not and that's ok. So I have this idea. I would like to rush right in and tell you it's about a ninja elf that I sort of saw on Pinterest who challenges the boys to do good works at Christmas time. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuttttttttttttttt............. Honestly it starts with grief (as a lot of stories do.) A few months ago I lost 6 loved ones in the space of about 8 weeks. Earlier this spring my husband lost his uncle and grandpa within 1 week of each other. But about MY loss (because MY loss is always more important than your loss right? Oooooh how many times I've thought or heard that.) Maybe I'll come back and tell you stories about the people I've lost this fall. There was a favorite first aid mentor who taught me a lot about life and first aid. A beloved uncle who I still can't believe is gone. There's the sister of my may-as-well-be-grandma who once gave me a fabulous tour of Victoria. My husbands grandma who I never met but wished I did. There was the 15 year old son of a friend. That death freaked me out! And then there was a friend who as much as I would have loved to have gone to her funeral I didn't because I'm still at war with her family. So I cried. And cried. Cried out of frustration that I couldn't get home to go to the funerals. Cried out of fear that if a friends son could die in his sleep could mine? Cried out of frustration. I began to realize that life is too short for stuff and not just the physical stuff. Maybe I know that anyways but......... The morning that I sat down to facebook and tried to peice together exactly what had happened to my friends family, and then realized in horror what had; my shock was interupted by news of D's grandma passing. You know what the headline story on facebook that day was? Facebook had changed their format and most of you reading this (present company excluded Staci) were outraged. I remember thinking "have a little perspective here people, you are inconvienced not troubled. It is only facebook. And so it began. I don't think I'm looking for meaning, I think I'm trying to simplify, trying to get back to what really matters. When Dick died I shared a very old country music video by Billy Dean called "Only here for a little while. That's what matters. I guess this doesn't tell you anything about my plans for a ninja elf but I'll tell you more in my next instalment of...........

When is a pot not so lucky?

I went to the PTA pot luck last week. I had wanted to take meatballs. Not just any meatballs but the super yummy scrumptious ones that I had had last Christmas at the old church. I emailed the lady for the recipe and of course she didn't respond. That made me mad and sad and frustrated. Mad enough to the point that I said "the heck with it! I'm tired of the usual stuff at pot lucks anyways, lets eat something good!" So I made Asian lettuce wraps and they were super, yummy, scrumptious!

I don't really know pot lucks from my childhood. My memory is that we didn't really have people over for dinner. We had company from out of town that would come and stay for a few days usually on their way to or from another destination. My Mom would labour for days over the feasts to serve them and I'll write more about that some time later. Instead of pot lucks we went "visiting." I would like to write more about "visiting" however I'm having a heck of a time finding stuff on the Internet about it. I'm just not using the right magical combination of words for the search engine. Then I tried searching for "calling". Which was even worse and then to complicate those matters I looked for "calling cards" and you can't even begin to imagine the chaos I found.

I guess that pot lucks entered my life when I joined a church. In the young adult glory days is was often my pots and everyone else was in luck! But I do remember going to a few full fledged adult ones at some grandparentish friends and discovering grandpa Jack's chicken wings. I also remember being at one the Christmas I came back from Korea having one of grandma Jean's homemade peanut butter chocolate cups in each hand just in case there wasn't any more and because I had been deprived of them for so long.

Ahhhhhhhhhh pot lucks I have known. Or, as some people call them "pot blessings" because in some churches the word "luck" just isn't done. In his super yummy, scrumptious blog "Stuff Christians Like" (that I just can't get enough of!) Jonathan Acuff says this: "Luck is a more accurate description of the food you'll find at church events, where everyone brings their own dish. They're not all blessings some of them are gross. Upon tasting them your mouth does not think to itself, 'I have just been blessed.' It might think, 'Wow! I have just been cursed.' And now you've got a "pot cursing" on your hands, which seems like something a drunk crock pot would start doing if you bumped into it and spilled it's drink at a nightclub." //stuffchristianslike.net/2009/04/515-taking-a-sympathy-scoop-from-the-dish-no-one-eats-at-the-pot-luck/

I remember my first pot luck somewhere in Illinois, I felt like I was back in Korea with a whole array of unfamiliar dishes that I needed Huggyband to interpret for me. That was also the first time I'd encountered Red Velvet cake AKA "stuck pig cake." In Indiana I was pregnant and craving comfort food but after the first spread of covered and smothered goo that made me feel sick I learned to bring a green salad with dressing on the side so I'd at least have something I wanted to eat. In his "Rules for Pot luck" (more like a survival guide), Jeffry P. Barnes writes 4) If you are lucky enough to see a relish tray with uncooked veggies, take them. Do not worry about others having enough. Your survival is important and you must be ruthless. http://recipes.stsams.org/recipes/rulesforpotlucks.html


Totally off topic here but I just discovered some of the very old Saturday morning PSA's on youtube. You know the ones that you're STILL singing the songs to? Here's "Don't drown your food." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfEG15CLTqo My Nana insisted that the only reason cooks put gravy on their food was to cover up the bad taste of their cooking. All I can say is that if I were going to cover up bad food, white gravy would not be what I would pick to do it with! Brown gravy on the other hand only goes to enhance the flavor of already yummy things like poutine.

Anyways.......... Pot lucks in the south were very adventuresome and required A LOT of interpretation. The good stuff was very, very good. Little Miss Teen used to look forward so much to Miss Shelby's broccoli, cheese cornbread that we affectionately began to call church pot lucks "feast days." Except for the bad the bad stuff........... I once heard a man scold his daughter for not eating anything and when I glanced over at her plate and saw all those boiled greens I honestly couldn't blame her! Our favorite, "not our favorite" dish was white bread and watermelon or pineapple sandwiches. They were just as they sound, white bread, a slice of pineapple or watermelon and a lot of mayo. As Barnes writes, 2) Avoid potato salad, or anything else with mayo in it unless you have seen it come out of the refrigerator. Avoid it totally during hot weather.


Honestly I've probably been the bringer of more pot curses as I have the recipient. I'm a great cook but sometimes accidents do happen. Like the time I dusted a cake with cornstarch instead of icing sugar. There was also the time I made a great spinach salad. I thought it was great, everyone else thought it was great, except for my best friend, who, not knowing that I had brought it, took a bite and pronounced "WHAT IS WITH THIS SPINACH SALAD IT'S HORRIBLE!" And sometimes I've brought the dish that nobody eats. Some friends of mine recently talked about what foods "go" at a pot luck and what foods don't. We agreed that elaborately decorated cakes don't. This I learned at Christmas after spending a lot of time on a cake that I took to a pot luck and then brought back untouched. Good for my family; bad for my ego. I've been told that very gracious kitchen ladies will do the kind if not Christian thing when they see this happen and very discreetly throw half of the dish in the trash so it looks like it's been eaten to preserve face. I've also been told that pies "go." This is probably because homemade pies are rare these days so people tend to snap them up when they can. I've seen great pies be snatched up even before they hit the bake sale table. I've also learned the hard way that the people of Ohio are gingersnap haters. Go figure! Go back to Stuff Christians Like to see what you should do if you are in fact the bringer of a pot curse.

One of the ways to take the "luck" out of potlucks is to have each dish designated. One of my friends got a note from the lady's guild at church telling her to bring cherries jubilee to the chicken dinner. Not only did she not know what chicken dinner they were talking about but she had NO clue what cherries jubilee was or how to make it! I'm also not a fan of the alphabetical divide. You know last names starting with A - G brings side dishes, H - R brings main course and the rest bring desserts. Well, I'm a W and like I said some days I'm in the mood to bring a salad. Or spicy Asian lettuce wraps that went over real well. It was a lucky pot luck day for sure.

And in case you're ever in need of something very yummy to take to a pot luck, here's the link http://www.grouprecipes.com/110886/asian-lettuce-wraps.html

Mother's Day

I had a beautiful and classic Mother's Day. Sunday school teachers helped the little boys make hand print crafts, I coerced Little Miss Teen into making a craft for me and I gave my Huggyband a list of ideas of things to shop (the fact that he left the list on the front seat of my van with the stuff he had bought crossed off is besides the point.) We dropped off a #1 Grandma mug at Grandmas (note to self; I think over 7 years of marriage I've given her 5 of these it must be my "go to" gift and I must remember to be more creative next year.) We took a road trip to get me my beloved Tim Horton's donuts and I didn't have to change any diapers. It was a happy Mother's Day indeed. I am blessed with 3 incredible children. Children I honestly didn't think I'd have. Since I'm an only child I thought for sure that I'd inherit my Mom's fertility problems; I didn't. I was afraid that I wouldn't know how to parent more than one child; somehow, I manage. They are the light of my life. They are what keep me going and I'll always be grateful for them.

Mother's Day is one of those fragile days; for some people it's good, for some people it's awful. Sometimes its both. Mixed emotions are common; tread lightly. It's like a flow chart; if YOUR mother is living (preferably close enough to celebrate with) and you have a great relationship or great memories of her then you're good. On this chart you get a free pass to the side that looks at YOU as a mother. But what if your mother isn't alive? What if the track you're going down is that of a loss daughter? I spent time on line yesterday with an old friend who lost her Mom in March. She was a great lady. Wise and talented.... She is missed. I spent time thinking about the family of the patient I lost last week as they met up with their first Mother's Day without her. I also spent time thinking about a few of my current patients families as they faced the reality that this would be their last Mother's Day with their Moms. My heart went out to them.

Obviously I identify with the daughters who have lost Moms. When Hope Edelman writes in her book "Motherless Daughters" that when her Mom died she "wanted to destroy every Hallmark Mother's Day card display" she saw; I say a big Amen. I've been there. Wishing I could just stay in bed and make the whole day go away. Wishing there was some way to teleport myself through certain months. I also remember purposely picking a fight with a young man on Mother's Day because he had in effect ran away from home. Cut his mother out of his life....... That was the first Mother's Day 2 little girls in my life had without their Mom and they didn't have a choice in it. I was angry, I was grieving and I let this young man know it in a very ungracious way.

The second side of the fictional flow chart is if you yourself are a Mom. I have been blessed with fertility and for that I am thankful. But we have friends who haven't. We have friends who are childless by choice and we have friends who feel that God simply hasn't called them to have children. Those friends are in the minority, because we have a lot of friends who want children but can't have them. Today there are 6.1 million woman in America with infertility problems. I can't begin to imagine how awful that must be. My husband can though. It took him and his late wife 12 years to conceive our Little Miss Teen. Yes, she was worth the wait, but it's not a wait he'd wish on anybody.

And then there is road number 3; loss Moms. It doesn't matter how old your child is when he or she passes the fact is that you're still a Mom and that child was still your child. 25% of American woman experience a miscarriage (a person's a person no matter how small) and 1 pregnancy in 80 results in a stillbirth. No; the euphemism "born sleeping" does not help me on that one. We lost baby Jonathan the week before Mother's Day 5 years ago. Talk about months you wish you could fast forward through.... I have a friend who lost a baby that was conceived in violence. She's still a Mom; she would have been a great, great Mom. I honor her. I wonder what Mother's Day feels like for her? I have a friend who's adopted daughter died within a week of her birth; yesterday was painful to her as well. She should have been receiving her first hand print card not grieving. And yesterday was my second Mom's (I have yet to find a way to distinguish my 2 mothers in writing so bear with me; she knows who she is!) without her son. I cried for her. I cried for him. Oh heck I cried for us all. Loss is unfair. Not being able to have kids is unfair. Loss is unfair... Children are fun. Motherhood is hard work.

How a cup of cold water helped me do the right thing and prove others wrong.

"And if anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones because he is my disciple, I tell you the truth, he will certainly not lose his reward."
(Mat 10:42)

I did this the other day. I reached through a group of people to a grieving woman and offered her a bottle of water. I had the honour and privilege of sitting with her and her family as we waited for her mom to pass. And Mrs. D did pass. Gently, surrounded by her family, pastors, a hospice nurse and me the hospice volunteer. It was the first time I was at hospice working with a family while their loved one died. The loss of my first patient this time around. 14 years ago, 2000 miles and what seems like 5 zillion years ago I lost my first first aid patient on a highway. For a lot of obvious reasons this one was different. It was sad of course, but there was a sense of calmness and peace not anguish and great despair as I was expecting. Heaviness but no fear. I was ok with it. I know that because of my depression there's been a lot of question of if hospice; which everyone seems to think is a sad, sad place, is really the best choice for me? Won't it make me sadder? No, sadness isn't a part of my depression. As the rest of this article will show; doing good does ME good. I get more out of it than I put into it. Helping heals me.

So when I handed Mrs. D's daughter that bottle of water our eyes met and volumes of compassion, sympathy, empathy and grief passed between us. I knew that in that simple act I had made a difference to her; I had shown her Christ and we had both healed just a tiny bit.

I also knew that the pastors across town were wrong about me. Part of the "we're kicking you out of our church" conversation included a few lines about how I would never be allowed to minister in that church again. I've since learned that fear of the depressed person contaminating the flock is a common pastoral response to depression. The problem with that is that it works on the presumption that depression is some sort of chosen sin. And as someone said to me "if depression is sin then so are allergies." No go. Doesn't fly. As they say in the south "that dog don't hunt." As my friends and I were discussing today; sometimes proving people wrong is the best revenge. Or if not revenge then at least proving them wrong feels very, very satisfying.

On the way home from that conversation with the pastors I thought "waaaaaaaaaait a minute, they're saying God can't use me? but God used all sorts of broken people. Heck he even used a prostitute!" Yeah he did use a prostitute; her name was Rahab and her story is told in Joshua 2:1-21. This sermon http://www.mmcc.citymax.com/f/W3Healing_Rahab_ProstituteGodUsed.pdf by Pastor John Rayford of Mount Moriah Christian Church in Bloomington IL says that "your past does not determine your future and that God wants to use your brokenness to let others know that he is not through with you."

Some of this is more than knowing that even in my brokenness God can use me but also wanting to be used. It would be so easy not to. To say "why should I do nice things for people when people have been horrible to me?" The answer is simply: because it's good for you. As my grandmother would say: "when you feel bad do something good for someone else it will help you feel better."

In the 13th Century Francis Asisi wrote:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.

I would add that it is in healing that we heal. In helping we are helped.

Oh Pastor F, who are you to deny me that healing? If you had truly wanted me to get better then you would have pushed me towards ministry not kept me away from it.
Proverbs 4:23 says "above all else guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life." Normally I think of that verse as meaning that you're supposed to guard your heart from the dark stuff that could take root and take over. I've come to understand that it also means not letting your heart shrink. Like the Grinch, whose heart was 2 sizes too small seeing the good of others made his heart grow. Good works, volunteering, loving others as Christ loves them is sort of the armature that I stretch my heart over ensuring that it doesn't shrink. I've quoted the line in the Garth Brooks song before "I do this so the world will know that it will not change me."

Honestly, 8 months ago I didn't care if the world changed me; I didn't care about the size of my heart; I just didn't care what happened. And I've healed enough now that is does matter. For those of you familiar with spiritual warfare you'll see that for all we talk about the big spooky stuff; it comes down to offering a cup of water to a grieving daughter. Doing good when you're at your worst. Shining the light and confounding the darkness (my paraphrase of John1:5)

Rock, paper, scissors: wheel of wow!

Hip Hip Hooray today is Webkinz Day! Ok, I know what you're going to say. "Cass is this another one of your strange little holidays like Mother Goose Day (May 1) and Frog Jumping Jubilee Day (May 19th). What are you going to blog about next My Bucket's Got a Hole in it Day. No silly! this in an important holiday! Besides, Hole in the bucket day isn't until May 30th. (Strange little piece of family trivia here; when my daughter was a toddler she called her bottom her bucket. So having a hole in your bucket has a WHOLE different meaning to us!) Anyways......... Webkinz Day marks the anniversary (this year it's the 5th) of the day Ganz (a Canadian company) first released Webkinz. Now according to my thing only 11 of you are reading this and I'm guessing that Lisa L is probably the only one who has no earthly idea what a webkinz is. In short think of it as a Beanie Baby with an on line component.

I used to mock one of my friends who collected Beanie Baby's (One year for her birthday I glued a doll to a can of beans and added a lable that said "B"s Beanie Baby! She didn't laugh). A few years ago when my 10 year old daughter wanted a Webkinz I refused on the basis that she was much too old for a stuffed toy and computer game. Now here we are 3 years later, she has 7 of them and I have ummmmmmmmmmmmm? 12! But hopefully by Mother's Day (yeah a real, real holiday!) I'll have 15 so I can get my second super bed! So what happened? Peer pressure first of all. I "oh so helpful" ladies on my favorite parenting boards convinced me that not only did all of their kids have a few but they themselves played with them. So I caved. And then I thought it was kind of fun and started "babysitting" H's while she was at school. That was fine until we disagreed about what on line clothes to buy the little critter; custodial disputes if you will. Then I started giving her into trouble for not doing her daily Webkinz chores; I have a hard enough time getting her to do chores in real life never mind in Webkinz land but hey. So by then it was pretty obvious that I needed my own; dozen.

What's the appeal? Sometimes it's the thrill of the hunt. You need to find 36? gems to get your "legendary crown of wonder." It took me a looooong time of searching 6 virtual mines to find them all. Now I've got 2 crowns and am working on my 3rd. There's also virtual trading for stuff that's pretty cool. Right now I"m in it for the shopping experience. Every time I play my hippo/beaver/lamb/caterpillar/pink flamingo/dog/goat/dragon/turtle/elephant and frog earn money. Money that I spend furnishing my 23 room, 9 garden mansion. And like the front of my current notebook says "shopping (even the fake kind) is cheaper than a psychiatrist. I'll say! This being America even in real life I could either spend $20 at my favorite thrift shop and get a lot of therapy or I could spend $20 at the counsellors office and get 1 minute of therapy. My husband of course prefers that I get my thrills by clicking the "wheel of wow" that earns me $20 kinzcash that I put towards a navigation control center for my space room.

Before anyone mocks me I'd like to say 1 word: FARMVILLE: 80,085,797 monthly users!

And speaking of games that we mock I'll take "rock, paper, scissors" for 500 please Alex. Rock, paper, scissors is a kids game right? Silly North American of course it isn't. Turns out that RPS or rochambeau or kauwi-bauwi-bo as it's called has been around in Japan since the late 19th century. The first time I encountered it outside of my elementary school playground was on my first night in China. After an exhausting flight from Vancouver, being met at the airport by a big bird puppet (don't ask) and 40 degree C heat and 100% humidity, then being told that I was to live with 2 strange guys, I was taken to a street bar to meet some of the other teachers from my company. Sitting in a plastic lawn chair, drinking ice cold pineapple beer and practicing picking up peanuts with chop sticks I noticed something familiar about what the men at the next table were doing. "Are they...............?" "Yep" I was told by another teacher, "it's a drinking game here; actually it's an everything game here and it's huge." In my 2 years in Asia I would come to appreciate rock, paper, scissors as a great decision making tool. Have 2 students arguing over who's going to go first? Make them rock, paper scissor for it. It worked 100% of the time and was a binding agreement. It worked so well that foreigners would sometimes suggest amongst ourselves that the whole North/South Korea debate could be settled by one long rock, paper, scissors match. Winner takes the whole peninsula. WE ARE JOKING OF COURSE! Someone very close to me does a very dangerous job in that region. I'm all too aware of the political climate and cultural differences.

Turns out that rock, paper, scissors isn't only an Asian game or a kids game either. Turns out there is an actual United States Rock, Paper, Scissors league (no I"m not making this stuff up!). Check it out at http://www.usarps.com/ or http://roshamblog.wordpress.com/ Laugh all you want but they're competing for $25,000 college tuition. Yes, I do see that they are competing in bikinis and it has as much chance of being a credible sport as beach volleyball (which I don't mind, we used to play it not on the beach but in the actual river). But hey as one girl put it "I could make $25,000 just by putting my fist in the air." Hmmmmmm, where is my daughter who's going to college in 4 years? I bet if she started practising now......... As for me? I'm about to go see if it's time to spin the "wheel of yum!"

Picture of mortality

Flipping through countless Easter pictures of my friends kids on Facebook. Most of the pictures alike; kids searching for eggs, kids with Easter baskets, kids in new Easter outfits. Easter in North America. A random click on a cousin's profile and new pictures. More kids; his nieces along with their parents and grandparents in the traditional "group pose" on vacation in Hawaii. I don't flip through this picture though. I pause on it giving it both my attention and emotions. A mixture of shock, nostalgia and happiness. Maybe it's because I miss the people in the photo. Maybe it's because I'm caught off guard about how much the girls have grown. Maybe it catches my attention because I'm jealous. I would LOVE to vacation with 3 generations of family in Hawaii. Port Clinton in July of this year will just have to do eh Dad? But I'm sure that the photo catches my eye because I have a similar picture downstairs.

Later this summer I'm planning on doing some photojournaling. Preserving the stories behind some family photos. I have a how to book that encourages picking out the photos and spending some time with them. Putting them in a visible spot and really examining the details. So I've started with a random one taken 36 years ago at our summer cabin. It's my uncle, my mom, 2 older cousins and myself. Mom and Uncle T sit in those old aluminum framed lawn chairs with the webbing; the boys and I are in various states of play in front of them. The sun shines in their eyes. My mom is wearing a chenille bathing suit because it is after all 1974. A random picture of every day life, or at least life on vacation. Life on vacation tends to move itself in suspended animation yet go by all too fast. To the little girls in the Hawaii picture it's their Dad and his first Daddy when Daddy was about their age.

Of all the pictures I have to work with I think I chose this one to start photo journaling with because I see just a glimpse of my cousins and myself as we are now in our parents. Like a reflection in shard of mirror. Not in how we physically look like them, but how we are becoming them. Or are they becoming us? Whatever it is for a fleeting second I'm reminded of their humanness. Maybe it's just because they're dead that I usually only think of them as parents. But in this hot summer day picture I'm reminded that they were real people. Parenting was one of their many roles. But in addition to that they were real people. My Mom was a woman who had sex, who missed her Mom and may or may not have loved shopping. (Part of the "deal" of losing a parent at a young age is that you don't get to learn any of these things about them.) As John McCrae said in "Flanders Fields" We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved... Soldiers, my parents, my hospice patients, my homeless brother; all human; all loved and were loved. Easy to forget, good reminder.

The other reason I chose this picture is because my mom and my uncle are dead. They have been for 15 and 28 years. Cancer took them both. But of course they didn't know that back in 1974 and that's what scares and fascinates me. They had no idea what the future would hold. Susan Sontag said “To take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt.”

Their vulnerability scares me because I can relate to it. How many random pictures do I have that some day my kids will look back on and say "that was before............" "If only we had known then what we know now........." Yes I know that all of this should make me vow to live every day to the fullest. All the great country music song stuff like "Live like you were dying." And some day it will. But for now it freaks me out a bit. Honestly I'm afraid of dying young and leaving my kids behind. I know they'll be ok if that should happen. I'm proof of that; I have cousins who are proof of it, I have a step daughter and I'm still in contact with the children of 2 precious friends who died waaaaaaay too young. Knowing that death at a young age can and does happen makes me confront my own mortality. If it could happen to them it could happen to me. “Parents, however old they and we may grow to be, serve among other things to shield us from a sense of our doom. As long as they are around, we can avoid the fact of our mortality; we can still be innocent children.” Jane Howard.

And what if I don't die young? What if I DON'T share the same fate as my mom and uncle? What if I get old? Without a picture of my own mom at 70 then I'll be honest and admit that getting older without her as a road map kind of scares me. As the class of 1990 approaches our "cough" 20th reunion there's a new question on the horizon for the first time; aging. There's a line in another song that says "I still remember when 30 was old." Heck I do too! And honestly I think that 40 is old. But it's gaining on me. I looked up an ailment the other day on line that basically said "well, that's what happens as you approach middle age." MIDDLE AGE? MIDDLE AGE?! Maybe it's my work with hospice that's making me think "when I get old, when I prepare to die I'll do....." How did that question get in my head? It's sort of like 10 years ago going to an endless string of friends weddings and thinking "when I get married I'll............" Or making a birth plan for having babies; this is what I want this is what I don't want.

I've mentioned before "The American Book of Living and Dying" by Groves and Klauser who maintains that the dying are teachers. I'm not at the point with my hospice work or patients where I can say that I've really learned cues on how to live and die well. Yeah obviously I've picked up the belief that hospice is the only way to go, that I want a Do Not Resuscitate order, I want to take my own quilts in and a moving picture frame. But other than that not much yet. Maybe I've been too busy learning the ropes to take the time to be observant but it will come I'm sure. For now the knowledge that I'm mortal and that everyone is human is a start. Loved and were loved..........