As I begin typing, I am not entirely certain that I will even publish this one.
I am fine, but others around me are hurting, so I hurt for them and am therefore lost in thought. Life is like that.
A dear friend of mine passed away this morning. She fought a very brave fight against cancer. I am proud of her. From what I gather, she won the first few rounds but when it came to the final bout, she accepted it. Of course, she could have continued fighting but that would have meant more suffering for her and her family. She faced the inevitable and I am of the belief that she left with grace and dignity.
She was once a neighbor of mine but only for a few years. From what I gathered back then, she was recovering from what I perceive as a terrible end to a marriage. In the years we were closest, I saw her struggle, I saw her recover and I saw her find peace with a new marriage. I also got to know her kids, who were closer to my own age than her. Even with distance, I am certain I will maintain a relationship with them even if it is only to check in every so often.
She was a good person. Knowing that she would soon be gone, I've recently spent a lot of time thinking about how much she influenced me in just a few years. In focusing on just her kindness and comforting nature I realized that she actually impacted my own child, whom I do not believe she ever met, in two ways.
First, and probably most significantly, when my marriage hit a "bump" and looked as though it was over, she talked to me in a very calm nature about not giving up on what you believe in and working through the pain even though you have every right to walk away. Even with what she had endured, she still believed in marriage and so did I.
Eight years later the end result of my marriage proved to be unavoidable, but at least I knew that I had tried and was always willing to save it, but mostly, four years after we had our "talk(s)" my child was born. Had I not stayed or tried to save it all, well.....
She also introduced me to something I still share with my daughter today. She gave me Wallace and Grommit. Sure it's a children's program and she didn't actually "give" them to me, but more than four years before I became a parent, I fell in love with a show that my child now loves to watch with me.
I had not seen her in years, but I feel a great loss in her passing.
At the same time, I have an Aunt lying in hospice care expected to die any day. She is a lovely woman whom I never heard complain or say a disparaging word unless, of course, her dinner was taking too long to be served in a restaurant. Granted, if she ever did say anything in anger in my presence I would most likely have not understood her.
She is 80 and was born in Japan in either '31 or '32. Imagine being a child in that era on the Japanese mainland. Imagine the hardships she must have endured. Imagine being a teenager watching a neighboring town go up in an atomic explosion. How do you find peace? How do you accept the world? How do you go on? Well, you just do. She just did.
Some time in the 70's she met my Uncle, in Japan, on leave from the Vietnam War. They fell in love and she came home with him. Shortly after she became a US citizen in the late 80's, he died. She stayed in the states.
I didn't really get to know her too well until the 90's although I had met her and spent some time with her as a child but I was probably more focused on Lego's. I did go through a phase in the early 80's where I didn't really trust her. I was sitting in a History class one day when I learned that her people had attacked Pearl Harbor!!! THEY DID WHAT? Oooooooooo..... I was a very offended by this. Before I was born, my parents and siblings lived in Hawaii!!! Granted, that was some 28 years after the initial attack, BUT STILL!!!!
Yeah, it was a short lived lack of trust and the panic I felt passed because, you have to let go. But at least I got to have my moment of drama before I got my world of understanding.
I found her a very enlightening person. She had her faults but I had a hard time seeing them through the kindness she always showed me. We had interesting conversations about religion that, although they weren't long, have really given me a better understanding on a grand scale. She wasn't a Christian (spoken in a whisper) but a lot of her religion was remarkably similar to mine. From this I took away "truth is truth and peace is peace." I think that helps me out a lot when I hear people using their religions incorrectly (even my own) to hurt others and pass judgement.
I think as a teen I once asked her to teach me how to fight. She looked at me and said something like "saw karate kid?" She taught me nothing. I asked her to teach me some Japanese. She didn't really teach me much, but I did learn the Japanese words for boyfriend and girlfriend... Boyafrienda and Girlafrienda.... Fabulous!
We laughed a good bit on occasion, mostly due to language barriers. I was lost in a conversation with her once when I assumed her senility had gotten the best of her and she actually believed she owned two high priced American cars when she was complaining about her problems with her "Cadirax." She didn't drive. As it tuns out, when a confused twenty-something in the Southeastern USA hears a Japanese person talk about their Cataracts they assume she is saying Cadillacs. It turned out that she was quite coherent and I was the fool. She got better with surgery.
I am touched by and grateful to both my Aunt and my neighbor for their presence in my life as brief as their presence has been. I know for a fact I have spent less time with my Aunt than I had with my neighbor, but overall I have taken away from them both the example they have set in accepting life's pain and hardships and moving on and living. I have not been as good at that as I would like to be.
I think that is what life is about. We try to learn from others. We share experiences and cherish those memories. We can live forever in each other and through those whom we pass our experiences on to.
Others who have spent more time with these people may not have seen in them what I saw. However, I feel I have been blessed by what limited time I shared with them.
I am of course lost deep in thought about all of this and I am sad. There are so many others living and thriving who have impacted my life. Most of them passed through my life in what now seems like a blink of an eye. It's like the movie "It's a Wonderful Life." We don't see how we impact others. We typically don't have the chance to ever know.
I just have to say that there are many people out there, some who have hurt me terribly but most have not, whom I am grateful to for how you have affected my life and molded the person I am still becoming.
Thank you.
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