#31: Understand and appreciate how fortunate I really am

This holiday season is one I am happy to see pass. But I am grateful for having made the decision to come home to my family despite my selfish need to hole up and scream BAH HUMBUG at everyone around me. I posted the below on Facebook on Christmas Eve, and thought I would share it here as well, as I did learn a little something about it all. Happy Holidays--is it 2009 yet?

I'm exhausted. I have had the day of perpetual hours, but in this day lies a story and a revelation most appropriate for this holiday season, sleep be damned.

To say my spirit has been tested and my beliefs about life challenged in this past year is putting it lightly. There is not much I claim to know right now, except that I don't know much at all. Until today.

This morning I found out that my Grandpa was admitted to the hospital with congenital heart failure. His lungs were filling up because his heart couldn't pump hard enough to keep the blood flowing. This had happened once before, but this time things are a bit more serious--and being Christmas Eve, very sad. You see, since my very first holiday I have spent every Christmas Eve with my Grandma and Grandpa Hub with only one exception (with the family of the man I love, which too was truly wonderful). It's rare these days to have such a strong family tradition, but through divorce, new marriage, family feuds and anything else you can think of, we always had Christmas Eve at Grandma's.

What else could we do but pack up and take Christmas to Grandpa?

I expected him to be weak, I expected him to be tired, but I did not expect his sense of humor. Depsite his labored breathing, he joked about what "happens here after midnight", flirting with the nurses, and x-raying his "empty head". Turns out the poor man also fractured his shoulder in a fall the night before. He also told my Grandma that he was certain he was dying.

A bit about my Grandparents...they married in a time when people married not for love but because it was what you were supposed to do. My Grandpa casually asked my Grandma if she wanted to get hitched one day, and that was that for the next 65+ years, for better or worse. I spent a lot of time with them as a child, and lord did they fight---to the point where it became a running joke in our family. I think we can all effectively immitate their typical banter--"Pete Stop it!!" and "God damn it, Marie!". I never would have called it a "loving relationship", depsite the love each of them individually bestowed upon our family.

I have only lost one of my Grandparents--many years ago unexpectedly. Death is something my family lacks of in experience. His illness is not new, but I think many of us refused to acknowledge that his death, like everyone else's, is imminent. With two exceptions--he and my Grandma.

While my Grandfather was the guest of honor, my Grandma was the one to watch. I had known that their relationship had changed over the past few years--he humbled in requiring her constant care, and her needing him, simply, to need her. I heard her tell him she needed him to come home. Beautiful yet heartbreaking, I watched the words unspoken to each other, oblivious to the 12 other people in the room. I saw the tears fill her eyes, the peace and acceptance in his. Standing there slightly embarassed to have witnessed the moment but so deeply touched by what passed between them, I am eternally gratefully to have been paying attention to what I was supposed to see.

At this point, they have stopped talking about my Grandfather coming home, but if and when he does their lives will be forever changed, and it is only a matter of time. Christmas too will now never be the same--the time has come for the tradition to evolve.

But what didn't and won't ever change is this: in the end, with not much else, there is love. Pure and simple. Everything they had ever experienced, his state of mind, their entire lives aside, there was love between them.

It's not complicated. It's simple, beautiful, and it exists in the places you sometimes think are the least likely. Love is a powerful life force that when nothing else matters, does.

And that my friends, is one thing I know to be true.