Her Awesomeness

Her Awesomeness
Practicing the royal wave/smile

Monday 25 July 2011

When you're her age, (over 80) what will matter to you most?

I'm going to turn this one on its head a bit, and make it 'when you at the end of your life, what will matter to you most?' and it is based on a conversation I had with my mom when she was on her death bed and had an urgent need to impart her final lesson to me. She expressed her intense sorrow at not having lived her life more in the way she would have preferred rather than the way she felt was expected.  It was so sad to see the one I knew to be so vital looking so crushed and defeated.  More so when she let me in to that pit of regrets as she knew the sands to her hourglass were running empty and there was no way she could do it differently. Nothing short of a miracle that is to give her that one gift she knew she would never have again - time.  Time to take long, leisurely walks on those foreign shores she passed through in her many travels, time to relish and not hurry those moments with loved ones, time to dance more, time to savour a joyous moment and not worry about anything else, time to be more feminine, time to let romance balm her soul, time to educate herself so that we would be more proud of her, time to live in the moment and just be, time to be a better mother, wife, sister than she thought she had been, time, time, time. She pulled me closer and rasped that if there's one thing I take from her, and try and make more of it is time. I feel that I fail her at times, even though I try hard to honour that promise extracted under such dire circumstances, and when I do I catch myself - for the one thing I know after seeing the life ebb away from my mom, is that when our time is expired it can never be retrieved. I can only hope that my consolation prize at the end of it all would be to have lived a life that mattered, where I can close the book to my earth life with satisfaction and contentment.

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