Bravery: A Perfect Example
Posted on | June 10, 2008
I’d never know until I was faced with it but it’s how I’d like to think that I’d think like this.
Am I an Eyeore or a Tigger?
My perception of myself is Tigger but I know there are those that think I’m an Eyeore.
Watch, you’ll figure out what I’m talking about. It’s 9 minutes long. Enjoy!
When my Mother was faced with the knowledge of her expiry date she had this relative calmness and release that I thought I hoped that I would have her demeanor.
I went into her room, on my 38th birthday, and she wished three things.
I want to live to see the twins being born.1
I want to find out what happens to “Harry Potter”.2
And finally, “I want to live.”3
But when the doctor, with all of us were around her hospital bed and she spoke about her eventual demise, she looked at the doctor and with a whisper (because that’s all she could manage) said, “Thank you. You’ve been very kind.”
See I’m not afraid of death, I’m afraid of dying.
I’d like a process wherein I could have time to have “visitors” who I could say what they mean to me and hear just what I mean to them and then just go away.
My Mother did that.
She lasted four hours out of the hospital and then one great big cough and she was gone.
Not that there wasn’t pain, there was some. But pain management now is so much better than in the past.
I keep running through my mind how I handled my last break up. Not great; and not an example of how I’d like to be remembered. It was honest, it was painful but it wasn’t very graceful.
But I do know this. And hopefully, this will be a reminder to my family who would probably arrange my funeral.
I want a freakin’, great, big, hoppin’, party.
There will be no, “Alas, poor Robert, we knew thee well” shit.
No: I want balloons. I want a roast. I want people making fun of my foibles.
And I want to have the last word.
Got the whole thing planned out.
Again, the other him reminded me of something great. I’m not that negative person that I have helped in portraying.
I love to laugh.
Hurt has its demons and it’s flailing but overall?
I’m pretty positive.
And I genuinely love life. I, like all, make bad choices. Those who can see past those bad choices, know where they come from, not judge you for those weaknesses: They are the keepers.
I’m a lucky man. I have about 12 people who I know fit that category.
Not that I’m welcoming the reaper or anything. And not trying to be morose.
But life is a chronic condition. It’s gonna happen.
As someone once said to me once, “It’s not how you enter a room, it’s how you exit.”
- My sister was pregnant with twins at the time. [↩]
- When she died my sister could hear in the ear phones from her walkman” that ‘Dumbledore’ had just died. [↩]
- followed by “But since I can’t, this is what I want for my funeral”. [↩]
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