Love & Disease - Taking Care of You

This post was originally written December 16, 2008. At the time I posted it on my other Space and once I deleted the account I saved a lot of my posts because in many ways they perfectly captured what I was experiencing at the time. Today, four years later I find myself re-reading a lot of my old posts and have decided to repost them as I start to put pen to paper with new points of view that have occurred since this time...


Date: December 16, 2008

Love and Disease

When my father passed away he was 46 years old. He died of a heart attack. This was after a triple bypass surgery that he had had not long before the heart failure. When you look at photos of my father he looked healthy, was not overweight and for all intents and purposes was fine. Reality is that he worked two jobs and would come home from one only to go to the next. He did this because he wanted to provide for his family and give them more than they could imagine. What he failed to recognize is that what we (his children) needed was more time with him. I was four years old when he passed away and my siblings were ten, eleven and twelve years of age.

My mother passed away when she was 44 years old. This came only six years after my fathers passing. She was diabetic and had liver problems. My mother never drank in her life but the diabetes had affected her entire system. I remember many times having to give her her pills and feeding her on her bad days. I remember catching her eating things she was not supposed to and asking her why she was killing herself deliberately. I remember being angry with her because I knew that she didn't have much time left. I could see her deteriorating before me. I was ten when she passed away and my siblings were 16, 17 and 18 years old.

Through the years I have found through books that I read and people that I meet in passing that the only guarantee we have in this life is death. As I get older I think about my age and how I get closer to the age my mother was when she was at her worst right before dying. I see my sister now 40 years old and how she worries about her kids and wants to make sure she is there for them. I talked to her the other day about how many things she is doing different. The main thing is that she is healthy and that times are different. Science and technology have made strides and improvements for both sets of diseases and although we are all at risk there are very real possibilities if we just take care of ourselves.

So on the other side of the token when I see people that have their whole lives ahead of them and deliberately throw it away by not taking care of themselves it makes me feel a bit resentful. I know I shouldn't feel that way but I do. I had gone out with someone not too long ago that shared with me as a right of passage I imagine that he was diabetic. As I looked at him he asked me if this was the part when I started to take care of him. I looked at him angry because I knew that for him he had a choice but he was choosing death every minute of every day that he would not eat the right foods or ingested the sugar that he ate daily. So I ended up walking away knowing in my heart what I wanted to say was No. This is the part where I walk away and you start loving yourself enough to take care of your own life. I've been down this path before and I refuse to go down that same path because someone doesn't care enough about themself to make the right choice.

So as the year comes to an end, nostalgia always sets in and my hope is that those of you out there love yourself enough to make the right choices if you have them to make. That you look at ailing parents with love and realize that there are many of us that would love to have just one more day with them. That if you have kids you choose to spend some time with them rather than putting in those extra hours at your job. That you take a moment to remember that every day you have is a gift and you get to choose what to do with this gift that you are given.