Lula, This is What the Living Do

Grandma, this is living. This is how it goes, full of disappointments and broken hearts; dreams that didn’t quite work out for you. This is the life that felt so unfair. Two marriages that left you abandoned, one child lost and two you pushed away. This is living, feeling alone and trapped – missing your own parents, brother and sister, and all those days from the past…often with fondness – often with pain and unworthiness. This is living – this is the sum total of what it means – the ache, the regret, the feeling of it just come up short for you. Yes, it is all there – written on your 95 year-old face and culminating with your youngest child stomping with rage on your grave.

This point is, I think you missed the living part – you missed the point of it all. You were so wrapped up in your fear and heartache that you didn’t see your son’s red hair in the summer sun. You didn’t feel your granddaughters hand gripping yours until it was too late to really grip back. You were stuck back on that Texas farm with a couple of long-dead mules, your Mama and your Papa, and an abandoned brick house.

Here’s what the living do do: we feel pain and fear and disappointment but we marvel at how tall our sons have grown this year. We marvel at the sweat on our baby’s forehead and the twinkle in his eyes. We sit with a confused child and explain about decimals and pronouns. We cuddle in the morning with our husband and wait to hear his sleeping breath at night. We tiptoe from room to room to check our children and see their still-small quiet peaceful faces. We bandage up a cut finger, we rub a sore tummy ache. We sit at dinner and watch the candles on the birthday cake. We dance with our son when he taps you on the shoulder and wants to dance to Pennies from Heaven.

We forgive, we forgive, we forgive. We forgive ourselves, we forgive our parents, we forgive life because truly the journey looks only like our perception of it. The sour parts were our lessons and the sweet our reward. This is living: making a cup of really great chai and sipping it in the crisp sun of morning. Smelling the air and seeing the ocean from my backyard.

This really is living: knowing that each moment holds so much beauty – beauty in pain and beauty in love and beauty in just being.