I could get hit by a bus….
Actually, I had a cousin who was killed by a bus while crossing the street. I think it was a bus but it might have been a car. You know how stories change over time and facts get lost in space. I remember the story this way:
My mother’s favorite Uncle, Hymie, had a son, Meyer, who served in the military. It must have been WWII. Shortly after returning home from his tour of duty, he was married and his wife was pregnant. He was killed by a bus while crossing the street. How does that happen? It seems almost impossible that a grown man crossing the street could die this way. Did he forget to look both ways, an error only a child would make? Did he suffer from post traumatic stress and a car horn frightened him into harms way accidentally? Why would someone who returned from war unscathed die in some freak accident?
I find myself struggling emotionally and then feeling I have no “right” to feel this way. My mother is 90. She has been in a lot of pain for a long time. She had a sore on her toe and she complained about how painful it was. I keep retracing my steps to see if I could have altered the situation I now find my mother in, battling gangrene and an infection in her bone. What if I would have paid more attention when she complained about her toe and what if I would have called her doctor or done research and realized my mother’s diabetes was at the root of the problem? If I had been more “on top” of the situation, more conscious of what can go wrong with a 90 year old woman with diabetes, and more proactive and made sure a culture was taken on the wound while it was still wet so the infectious disease doctor would have targeted the bacteria with the best possible antibiotics instead of having to just blast her with some generic antibiotic hoping it would do the trick? Then would my mother still be happily eating dinner each night with her friends in Lincolnwood Place? Did I let her down? Even worse, did I let myself down?
What can we control in life? How aware do we have to be at all times, and is it even possible to be focused on each and every thing that can go wrong from the moment we wake up to the time we go back to sleep. Or is daily life more like plugging a hole in a damn only to find another leak has sprung from a different crevice? I guess I will have to soothe myself with the thought that if it had not been this problem, something else could have or would have happened to rob my mother of her mental acuity and seemingly indestructible physical being. If I don’t convince myself of this, I may drive myself crazy.
Acceptance of undesirable situations is the most difficult challenge for most of us. This explains why Denial is so prevalent in our society. Mishap, accident, oversight, does it really matter HOW we arrive at a moment in time that changes everything in our world? Whether it was a car accident, a tumor undiagnosed, a dive into a sand bank or walking home just as a murderer is looking for his next victim, the end result is often the same, lives turned upside down. Control vs. Fate. I keep thinking about my mother’s many clever sayings and how she peppered my childhood with words of wisdom hidden inside cheesy clichés.
She always said when it is “your time to go” nothing can change that as if she truly believed what they tell us on Rosh Shoshana and Yom Kippur. When we are born and when we die are things that have been decided long before they ever occur. So should I go searching in the reservoirs of religion hoping to find peace and strength? And if I do, what will I really find? I know a journey with one goal in mind always results in finding things we never planned on looking for to begin with.
I am standing on the cliff, poised, preparing for the moment when a strong wind at my back blows me over into the empty space before me….
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