I Choose Love

Without children living at home, the new title of empty nester still quite new, my thoughts swoop to places uncharted.  Only fifteen days without R. in the nest and fifteen days of being a "just the two of us" with five of those at a family wedding.  Stop counting Ellen.  That is me, the one who logs down emotions and thoughts, calculations of living.  I can't help it. 

So what one may ask, is transpiring in those thoughts?  A lot.  Given that it has been a year of extreme lows and extreme highs I can't help but think these thoughts belong on a trapeze.  Swinging back and forth, being caught (God I love my husband for holding me tight), swinging out freely on my own (God I'm grateful for my self-stability and trust in myself), then from lofty heights I fall into a soft net of my loving family.

After watching my mom lose herself from Alzheimer's, with urgency I wish to live more fully.  I want to do it all.  I want to go everywhere, NOW.  Not later, now.  I want to smell every flower, touch the softness of every petal and hold it's delicate blossom knowing soon it will fade.  It's not that I am thinking of my own demise, though those thoughts certainly have come up when you lose your parents and wonder "what now?".    Rather than take that step to that door, I choose life and that other door called living.  

Sometimes my thoughts travel back to when Papa died and that turning point where I knew my mom was dying, figuratively, because she gave up on ever being truly happy again.  Fourteen years of living but not wanting to be living.  Then the last three + years where her brain became emptied unvoluntarily.  I've wondered if her ability to love was only for him.  What might cause one to abandon the essence of loving?   One can give and give your love to someone who has given up on love and in doing so you can become weakened and can find yourself hurt, angry, and in the end with my mom I became empathetic.  Deep inside I knew there was nothing left that I could do to help her.  

I'm blessed to be married to this man, my Love.  He has loved me through every stage of my life and I to him.  We both yearn to see the world and to be with our family whenever we can.  I'm ready to allow myself to be silly, something that has been lost to me for quite some time.  Laugh at myself, love myself, discover who I am and whom I shall continue to learn about.  

Time is precious.  Neither of us want to waste a moment to live in happiness.  We can't avoid the days that surely will come of grief or sadness.  Slump days will happen, illness will happen, days of utter delight will happen.  Balance.  Karma.  Yin-Yang.  

What I'm observing in myself since R. has left is the renewal of the amazing relationship I have with my Love.  It's sort of like dating all over again.  And that is pretty darn fun.  I'm learning to listen with intent and not with "uh-huh" half heartedly.  When you are in a relationship that spans as long as we have you can sometimes not listen with both ears.  I've done this and he has too.  I'm ready to woo and be wooed.  So what that we have been married for 37 years?  Let's begin again and again.....

 I choose Love.  

A family in mourning

She left her home on Monday with a bright red sweatshirt on, riding her bike and went to school.  She didn't stay but got on a Bart train heading to San Francisco.  A photo of her exiting the station shows her with her bike, wearing earphones for an iPod.  The last image of a beautiful young woman.

What happened to Allison?  What triggered her to leave with the intent to end her life?  I am torn up inside with the questions.  She was 15 years young the same age as my son.  She felt she had no friends is what my son heard.  They went to different high schools in our town, he didn't know her.  My son tells me this as we drive home from school today.

I want to hug my son but I am driving the car in the crazy school traffic outside the campus.  I tell him what he already knows, that he can talk to his dad and I anytime about anything.  That we love him so very much.  That he is loved by all his family.  


Allison left a trail.  I want to believe she wanted to be found and did not want to end her life, for why ever else would she have done this?  On her computer it showed directions from the Dublin Bart station to the Golden Gate Bridge.  Her bike was found, locked, in the Presidio area in San Francisco near the Golden Gate Bridge.  She left a suicide note at home and was considered "at risk".  Was she "at risk" before or because of the note?


They know she went onto that bridge because they have found footage of this on the two cameras at either end of the bridge.  She never walked off.


So now her family waits for the discovery of her body.  The pain they all must be feeling.  The pain Allison must have felt to plan her last day, her last moments.  


I have never been so sad or depressed to feel that I can not live in this world any longer.  I can't know that pain.  I only know that I wish that she could have been helped to know she was loved.  That she had a full life ahead of her.  She was in sports and will be missed by her teammates.  She will never get to go to Junior Prom or the Senior Ball.  She will never graduate from High School or go to college.  Never travel, never explore.  She will never find the love of a soul mate or have children of her own to love.


I hope that in the sweet hereafter Allison is being held in loving arms.  Surrounded by those who will let her know how loved she is.  I hope that her family are surrounded by loving arms as well because their deepest pain has only just begun.


Today started off rainy and grey and they gave way to blue skies and puffy clouds flying by.  The green leaves on the trees dancing and swaying in the gusty wind.  How can life be so beautiful but not beautiful enough?  Oh Allison I am holding you in my arms and wanting to sooth your troubled brow.  I want to rock you and let you know life is more than precious.  It is more than words can say.