Waiting on Time

Over the weekend, my mom and I decided to visit my 82 year old grandfather in North Carolina who was ailing from a pneumonia infection over the past couple of weeks. He was hospitalized for a week and then sent to be in a nursing home/rehab center for two weeks. At first, the infection crippled his body to the point of doctors needing to remove excessive fluid from his lungs. He also struggled to maintain his normal body temperature. In addition, his ability to walk on his own without a wheel chair has diminished. Thankfully, mom and I both saw that his health had improved dramatically in comparison to before. He's able to eat (a lot), stand and walk a little on his own, talk (a lot), maintain his blood sugar levels (I forgot to mention that he's also a diabetic), and maintain his normal cognitive and most of his motor skills. My mom has been a daddy's girl all of her life and it shows. I didn't want his condition to worsen because I wasn't sure how I was going to handle the strong emotions that my mother would feel. I wasn't sure how I was going to comfort her. Thus, I was glad that my grandfather's health has shown promise. He will physically be returning home to be with grandma and the rest of family this Thursday.

But while I was in the nursing home, spending time and catching up with my grandfather, I found myself looking around at my surroundings. Behind the beautiful building with clean, white panels and pillars, large gates, and polished floors, there were ailing people who were suffering from Alzheimer's, stroke that left them near motionless, or who were simply victims of an advanced life clock that just kept ticking; waiting for them to die. I imagined all of the stories that their lives would share that were full of adventures, successes, failures, and regrets. Regrets. What may have been some of the things that these senior citizens may have wished to go back in their lives and changed? Or wished that they had done but time and age caught up with them before they could get the chance to? There was no laughter, joy, or fulfillment in that nursing home. No one sat around each other and talked about their lives. Though it's almost impossible to tell what lies behind the eyes of an elderly person just by looking at them, I couldn't fathom any true happiness. Maybe there was a deeper source of contentment that I couldn't see. Maybe there wasn't.

Knowing that there will come a day where I would physically age and eventually transition into another realm (in which we all call "death"), this experience reminded me that life is short. As cliche as it sounds, 80 years to live and enjoy life isn't a very long time. There are so many things that I want to do that I've made excuses for not doing: Don't have the time, not enough money, not the right time, too stupid to do, what will others think?, etc, etc, etc. I realized that time will never wait for me, so why should I wait for it? There will always be work and responsibilities and those will never go away. So why not use the life that I've been given to my advantage and go live? Too often than not we're exposed to the degrading and violent side of living. I learned that not everything in this world is totally bad. Yes there is violence, crimes, hate, abuse, fraud, debt, disease, cancer, brussel sprouts...but this life is also full of creativity, splendor, geographic majesties, beauty, love and art that comes in many forms. Focusing on just "surviving" this life and then dying is what I've been programmed to do by society at large. I don't want to just "survive" I want to live and age long enough to tell my stories one day. Even if I wound up in a nursing home if God allows me to see 82, hopefully I would leave enough evidence to show that I didn't just exist, but existed passionately.