Some Advice

One of my children is struggling so I wrote some advice based on my own experience:

This has been a difficult year for me. Several people have asked me how I have got through it. So many firsts….the first year I have celebrated a birthday without your dad. I celebrated the first Thanksgiving without him. Now it will be the first Christmas. How have I managed?

The source of my strength and courage, as is true of everyone, is the presence of God. Whether we want to acknowledge it or not, God is with us, right beside us and within us through every good time and every bad time of our lives. God is not responsible for the bad things that happen to us any more than God is responsible for the good things that happen to us. God is just there for us with courage and strength to give to us. But like any gift, we have to accept it; I have found God in my wonderful friends, and even in my animals. I have stayed busy doing things that needed me to do them.

At first, after your dad died, I threw myself into cleaning my house and doing my yard work. I had you and you were a loving influence in my life. But all the while, during those terrible months when he suffered with the lymphedema, I knew God was right with us, giving me and even your dad the strength to meet each new challenge as it presented itself. I only felt myself weaken once. It was the night he went down in the utility room floor and I couldn’t get him up. I sat on the floor and cried…feeling sorry for myself and him. Then I got up and called the EMTs to come get him back to bed.

From that point on, I knew God would sustain me.

During that last week, you kids were with us. Together, as family, we pulled together. God’s Spirit was found in each of you as your love for your dad and me was expressed in so many ways. Our friends brought in the food to sustain us during that week, their love and concern sustained us as we saw God working through them as many of them came to visit him.

Afterward, we all found the strength to prepare for the Celebration of his Life. God strengthened us and sustained us through the love we felt for one another and your dad as we drove to the reunion grounds to scatter his ashes…just as he wanted done.

After that week, it was a matter of staying busy, enjoying the company of many friends as they called and asked me to one lunch after another and to one meeting after the other. I immersed myself in “good works”. I invested one morning a week in visiting with Phyllis while Bob Avery went to breakfast with his friends. I went through her declining health with him, trying to be support for him. Every time she went to the hospital, I was there with her and him. After he had to put her in the nursing home, I began to visit her even more regularly.

Every week, at least one person calls me to have lunch with them. I always accept because once we begin to refuse to go, they stop asking us. I also ask others. I invite Phyllis F on a fairly regular basis. She has been alone ten years since Harold died. I ask Bob A. He has a wife but she is really gone. Only her body remains.

Between Coffeyville Ministerial Alliance, Independence Ministerial Association, MC3 (the clinic board) and PINCH, the organization your dad belonged to, and all my friends and family, I stay busy and I see God expressed in their caring for me and my caring for them.

So make a friend and do things with that friend. Immerse yourself in your work and make a great success of your career. You know you have it in you. And most of all, learn to enjoy your own company. Until you do that, you will not feel like a whole person.