Life is funny sometimes, sometimes it is just what we expect it to be but even when it goes the way it is supposed to it can pack a wallop we may not be ready for.

 

How is that possible to go as expected yet still surprise us and leave us breathless and stunned, unable to ascertain what should be the next logical and ..yes expected step?

Today’s Mental Moment

is about life, how fragile it can be and how even when thing go the way they are “supposed” to, i.e. in the proper order of things that have been going that way for eons, it doesn’t make it easier to bear.  It doesn’t change our grief.

It is also dedicated to my dear friend, and to his mother.

Many of you know El Guapo – just some guy as he like to tell it but from where I sit, he is a friend not only unerringly to me, but to many here in the blogoshpere.  He cares about people, he cares about people he doesn’t know and had never met.  He wants and seems to have the idyllic simple life with his wife the infamous (or is she famous now that we are all in love with her?  I never get those right.  Matters a wit not for she is his and he is hers.) Go to work, bloggity blog, read everyone else’s blogs. goof around on Twitter, be silly, go to a concert, drink a pint and in his heyday, I heard he danced naked on bars.  He would love to have the great adventure – the reason he began blogging and never once has he let me down when I needed a friend.

Ever.

He is smart enough and funny enough and gosh darn it – people really really like him.

The last three or so months, his life has been a little more complicated by having to make a trip uptown on a bus or train or maybe both, nearly everyday to visit his mom who has been, was …  who was sick in the hospital.  It has been a long three or so months but I rarely ever heard him complain.  Yes he was tired, yes it messed with his schedule, but he did it as a dutiful son, a loving and devoted son from where I view it, a son I can only hope that one of my three will have so much dedication to me when I am sick, and in the hospital someday.

Consider This;

In life there seems to be a natural order of things.  You are born, you grow, whether mature is subjective, you get older, your parents get older, you take care of your parents, your parents die.

If things go out-of-order, say you have to bury a child, it is sometimes seemingly unbearable.

Yet, when our parents pass, should we feel less because it is the natural order of things?

After all they have been with us since the day we drew our first breath.   That is forty some odd years.  That is a long time to have someone in your life and then to suddenly…not.

Even if they were sick and it was expected, the time is never certain, the fragility is that at a moments notice, the time has come.  Should you be better prepared because we are supposed to bury our parents?

Grief is a journey, you can not go around it or over or under it, in order to heal, you must always, always go through it.  Everyone grieves in their own way in their own time, taking a detour that might be awhile from their regular life, or a few moments back to the door that is your life but one thing is certain, no matter how it is “supposed to happen”  there will always and forever from that day on, be a space where once was your mom, or your dad.

I can not fathom the thought.

So be it natural or expected, do not let it deter you from the path you need to go.  Feel what you feel.  We will all be here for you my friend and I know you are in good hands with TMWGITU to help.

For the rest of us, take a moment to think about life and how we take it for granted and how we do too take for granted that because it goes as it should, it shouldn’t be so hard.  Bullshit.

We are but fragile beings on this earth for a short time.

Guapman, you are a living legacy to your mother because there is not a man as good and true and upstanding as you are that did not learn these things starting with his Mother.

She was I can tell, just by who you are, a good and lovely woman.  I won’t tell you she is in a better place, or any of that, just that my very dear friend my sadness for your loss is endless…I am a mother, and I have a mother and I can not begin to think how it feels.

Rest in Peace the mother of my friend, I think had I met you, I would have told you about your son, some of the things you maybe didn’t know that he does, I would have thanked you for he is a friend I can always count on.  And, I probably would have shown you a few Veggie Tale Videos and asked you kindly to talk some sense into him.  But mostly, I am sure I would have liked you very much too.

Grieving is for the living, we must do it as it comes.  It won’t always be this way…but it too will never be the same.

And life, goes on

To Your Mental State, Whatever it may be…..