IN some ways, getting older is an odd blessing because we have already faced some of our biggest fears and discovered that we’re actually bigger than our fears. Looking back, we see them knocked over and silent on the battle of life.
But have we really?
As we head for tomorrow, we’re confined to our own homes by this virus that lept out of China insidiously and spread out across continents. A clear and present danger, isolating millions of people with no immunity to this new invader.
This takes a toll on our hearts. How can I keep by brood safe from harm? They’re soared into far away nests. How can I stay healthy when so many of my friends and loved ones who have either fallen ill or died? What measures can I grant to safeguard my financial future is such a climate of economic disaster?
And for me, all these questions bring a shimmer of anxiety down my octogenarian spine. But I know that eventually, our lives will change…as they say, love and lives always do.
So you know what I do? I pray all the time and then I laugh. I laugh a lot about my wrinkles and my smile. Life is funny.
Laughter fills my life with joy and joy equals strength — strength enough to face the biggest fear in the face and say: “Alright, I know you’re going to win the battle someday, but today is not your day and tomorrow doesn’t look good either.” I said that from my tough imperfect heart. I remember long ago, when my husband was still around, that I asked a friend, who we have not seen for a while if he could have dinner before my husband died.
Rex Flores, who had a huge heart and a beautiful heart, did not miss a beat. In true wit, he deadpanned, “No let’s do lunch after the funeral.” I screamed, he screamed and even my husband screamed.
We all “died laughing” as one might say. Yes, that’s the way I wanna go.
This is the spring of our discontent with one another, with moments that function as a close family (three grown-ups and two children) this time was the winter of our discontent with one another, we didn’t hang out together. We rarely talked or ate with one another, be we are surviving after all these realizing what was happening.
Finding comfort in these dark times, for the first time, we realized we were a family who gave one another space to be ourselves. We have never done that before. It is as if we all knew that this was the end of a chapter in our lives and the beginning of a new one. The umbilical cord that has bound us together as a unit all the years is about to be severed. It is not frightening for the 21-year-old to contemplate as it was for his mother. They have been dealing hostility, as we countered with our last rush of superiority.
From this day on, our lives will turn in different directions. In many ways like a river, it would wind and twist with a promise of a new experience at each turn of the bend.
There would be smooth waters for long stretches, then suddenly a patch of rough rapids that would test us, and take away our control, it would demand everything we’ve had to hang on, and back on the course again.
We have days, months, who knows to think and observe one another: away from schedules, friends, social bonding and conversations that sounded more like bulletins of a better place than the solitude of home.
We all had a lot of thinking and growing up to do, a lot of things to prove ourselves. These are times that we will talk about and remember, the pictures we pour over in family albums. We never say it to one another but this will be the last to remember, for the old boy – last spring of his mother and
grandmother. From that day on, all moved to become contemporaries.
It was the silence that awakened me…that some ominous choice when you get at the bathroom door and yell, “What is going on in there?” And a small very voice says, “Nothing grandmama!”
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E-mail Mylah at [email protected].
