This fact of life is one of the first lesson I ever learned. My mom had one wonderfully frustrating characteristic: She never sugar coated the truth. If it was black she called it black, not gray nor white as in white lie, but black. Life is not fair and that is a biter pill to swallow, for anyone, lest along a child. What I had was a loving and safe home and that gave me a semi-soft place to land when life was, uh, life.
I now find it ironic that this same woman, who both loved me and corrected me, has taken a stance of not being so brutally honest. Hell she has decide not to even to tell a white lie! She is just flay out lying! And I am o.k. with that.
Why? Because life is not fair and there is really nothing she can do to change it. She has a disease that simply put will kill her. So when people ask, she says “I am fine” or I doing good” or some other lie along those lines. Why? I think it’s because she knows others cannot change a thing and the burden of sympathy is heavier than the reality she faces. So she lies.
I on the other hand am now brutally honest with others about her and her disease. I have to be brutally honest with me as well. Shes more than likely going to die a pretty ugly death and there is nothing I can do about. So why be so honest? I want others to know no one lives in a vacuum and that your actions and my actions truly affect others. Most people can handle the truth if given a chance.
Life is too short to live in a lie that life is fair. What I am learning from my mom’s ‘lies” is the truth, just for the truths sake, does not change things. It’s just a fact and we have to figure out how to traverse this and other truths. What I am gleaning from this also is we cannot nor should we just get over it. Sometimes the best we can hope for is to hang in there till we can get past it no matter where it takes us.
Pondering Things and Taking Pictures 
Hi, John, My late husband spent the last ten years of his life dying. He had congestive heart failure and had been expected to die three times… and each time he had this will inside him to live… but each time was a destruction of the man I knew and loved… yet our love grew deeper with each day. He taught me to be honest…but with such a twinkle in his eye… you ended up laughing. When he got tired of people asking him how he was, he’s reply, “I got up this morning, didn’t I?” and you just had to see his face to understand that some people are all grit…and able to lend it to others so they can be all grit too…yet still smile. I have to confess, though that for years after he died, I felt like my face would crack if I smiled. But his eye-twinkles kept after me and healed me with his love.
I am glad you are able to smile again Merrill. And believe it or not I can too. but my mom is real sick and there is no such will to “grit it out”in her. Stage four non-small cell lung cancer is an unforgiving beast.
I went up an delivered a used lift chair I was given for her.I did not get much out of her because she just does not have it in her right now but when she smiled there was a twinkle in her eyes as well.Thanks for the encouragement and I am glad you feel fee to share your story here. You are always welcomed.
John, eh? I am sorry to read that your mother has to deal with that. Life is about death as well and something nasty waits for all of us. You are sensitive and real and I think of you as a friend. I care.
Thanks Mike and yes just Plain old John but I like it! And you are right I have known since a wee lad life ends at some point. I remember watching the body count being shown on my grandpa’s old B&W TV during the Vietnam War. I also remember knowing that meant someone was not going home.
Here is to Hoping the old ending is a new beginning…….
Here here! Jolly good!