Life Events

In every life you are only promised one thing...death. You aren't promised love, beauty, compassion, fun, success, intelligence, or wealth. You aren't even promised your first breath. Anything we have or achieve beyond our first breath is luck or hard work. Each day we pass through before we die is another miracle that far too often we take for granted.

I'm traveling this week. I came to northern California to see a young friend graduate from high school. The fact that she achieved what some may consider a minor milestone, I consider a miracle based on what I know of her private life. I don't feel it's my place to share her life story with you, but I will briefly explain that she doesn't live with her original family due to some ugly experiences including being told that she wasn't any good at school so she might as well drop out, which she did at the time. Now, with the support of her new family, she has become an inspiration for me.

At her graduation, there were students from two alternative schools and two GED programs. So a student of the year was chosen to speak from each program. These students all overcame great adversity to attain their prize of a diploma or GED. Their words were not memorable to me, but the thoughts they inspired were:

Human rites of passage remind us to
continue to push ourselves to achieve
new things and to hold those we love
closer.

A successful life is about surpassing
barriers, regardless of age, origin,
finances, or other limitations.

Our successes strengthen and
motivate those around us to
achieve more in their own lives.

Without action, dreams blow away
like clouds.

We must be advocates and
cheerleaders for ourselves in our
own lives, because sometimes there
isn't anyone else and who else knows
our needs better than we do.

That same night, at almost the same time as the graduation, a girl a year younger than my friend was giving birth to a baby boy. He was four weeks premature and just under six pounds. If he had been in a good quality neonatal ICU, I have little doubt that he'd have been fine. But being in a small town hospital, he died during the night, leaving a too young mother and the rest of the family grieving deeply. Now, she must still struggle with the discomforts of the body that occur after childbirth without the comfort of the beautiful child that mothers each say is worth the pain.

Being so far from home, there wasn't much I could do to help with the grief or the funeral preparations. So I looked to the internet for some comforting words to say. I looked up Bible verses to comfort those who have lost a child and poems written by parents whose babies have died and ended up with tears running down my face, but nothing that I thought would ease this girls' pains. One poem, about how a piece of their souls turns into a butterfly, jumped out at me and reminded me of my mother's funeral where a butterfly came inside the funeral home and landed on her casket for just a moment before they carried the casket out to the hearse. With so many thoughts and so many resources I still could only say, "I'm sorry for your loss and I'll pray for you and your family."

There isn't much else one can say. Those that leave us to pass through the veil have been fulfilled, granted the one thing we are promised. It's those of us that are left behind to continue to test our luck or work hard to climb to the next goal who must grieve. We grieve for their absence from our lives and the milestones in life that they will miss. Our prayers should ask for help in living a life that those who have left us would have been proud to have seen if they had been able to stay.