Looking Out My Back Window #218

Originally posted on Facebook HERE

Another beautiful day in Wisconsin. How many more before Winter takes over? The change is coming, you can feel it. We’re gonna lose Daylight Savings Time. The days will get shorter, the nights will get longer…. I wish it would just be sunny and 70° always sometimes. But it won’t. I wish everyone I know and love would live forever, including myself. But we won’t. I wish Gizmo would get more years of life than a dog usually does, but he won’t. Thinking a lot about loss this morning. I woke up and saw that a friend of mine lost his dad recently. In my business I help people through times like this in their lives, so I’m often meeting with the people left behind after a huge loss – father, mother, husband, wife, child, grandchild… I’ve seen it all. For whatever reason when I saw the post earlier today that his father had passed, it brought me right back to 1981 when my own father passed away. I was 22 and in the midst of my heavy drug and alcohol abuse that started when I was fourteen. I loved my dad. We never had any sober adult years together. Breaks my heart. I can’t even describe the emotions that welled up inside me as I typed that. I was high at the funeral. I had to greet everyone in the line, there was an open casket. I stayed in the room until everyone had left. I was the last person to see him other than the funeral home staff before they closed the casket. It was the first major loss of my life, and it had a deep and profound effect on me. We will all have to deal with loss in our lives. To love something or someone always comes with the risk that it can be taken away in an instant. I’ve had more than one friend lose everything they own in a house fire. Those of us who have pets know the pain and suffering that you feel when they suffer at all and especially when they pass. And at some point in our lives we’re going to lose people we care about as well. As we age we lose physical ability, our eyesight and hearing often gets worse, more aches and pains, less freedom to move as we’d like to, as we used to. Losing anything we feel great love for can be debilitating. The grieving process is different for all of us. My father died 40 years ago, but to this day I can bring myself back there and feel the pain I felt when I got the call in the middle of the night that he passed. Everything in our lives on Earth will come and go, including us. We will all have a serious, painful loss at some point in our lives. No getting around it. The only way we can look at it is to enjoy whatever time we have with the people and things we love as much as possible. And take nothing for granted. Why are we so angry all the time? We don’t have time for that. Wouldn’t it be awesome if years from now people started asking themselves “Why are we so happy all the time” instead? Sadness will envelope you during a period of loss, but eventually you’ll be able to look back and see what a great gift it was that you had that thing, that companion animal, that person, in your life at all. Because there would be a huge hole in who you are today without them. And for someone else in your life – you will someday be the hole in their heart. Let’s not let ourselves be fooled today. Everything is transient. Love each other. Do the right thing. Be kind. Cut yourself some slack. Take a day off. Know the wonder and beauty of every instant you get. And let’s be there for each other when we go through the tough losses as well, because as much as we don’t like to think about them, they’re a part of life.