9/17/2025 One Day At A Time...

I am two months away from 68 and have learned there are many forms of loss:

The loss of health.

I try to eat right... Well sometimes, am active and have reasonable genetics.

Yet the ever increasing loss of my youthful energy and body is, at times, the stuff of tears.

Oscar Wilde said it best, “Youth is wasted on the Young”.

Yet day by day, I find a way to appreciate my body.

It no longer has to meet a societal standard.

My weight, my scars, the wrinkles and greying hair are the road maps of who I am.

The loss through disconnecting is deep, but we can learn to think of that important loved one with affection and through memories.

They were for awhile still in the world, just not in mine at times.

This is a truth for several siblings and a few friends.

I had to learn to let them go.

I miss them, I miss the times we shared.

But I’ve have to accept, we each walked our own paths, and there were many forks in it.

The loss of dreams have been deep. We live with expectations.

Few of us will reach a point that we exist without them. While I have modified my current ones and am actively watching out for potential ones, those dreams in my past remain bittersweet.

I envision I'd be like many of my family members, married to my first husband forever.

But my first husband fell very short of who I had believed him to be. The normal routine became 10 doors smashed with his fist and the knowledge someday soon it would be me!

There was no change or reform from him so he left me with no choice but to ride out of Dodge after 14 months and then several months to get an eventual divorce.

My amazing Mother spent her last 1.5 years loosing to cancer. I tried to be there at her side. She was hospitalized for her last few weeks of life and there I stood.

She fought a hard battle but left this life anyway.

Those last minutes I held her hand and whispered to her not to suffer.

She was gone within minutes of me (3 months pregnant with my youngest daughter) leaving her room.

At the very end I was grateful that at least she no longer lived in pain.

I thought I knew pain of loss with my mother's death when I was 24 years old,

but great loss continued with the death of my father on Jan. 23, 1997,

A few years later my nephew's death (who I loved like a son) Aug. 17, 2000,

Also in Oct 2000, my younger brother was incarcerated for life for murder of his wife.

Then my sister and almost a second mother died in 2005, My actual stepmother died in 2006.

Then unexpectedly my older brother died in 2016.

For all practical purposes I am the only one left in my linage.

Throughout most of these losses I had my rock, my husband was always with me at my side. It was all bearable with him.

Then when I least expected it, the greatest loss of all losses happened May 31, 2014...

My love, my husband of 36 years left my side and the world as I knew it ended. One of the hardest things in life for me was to stand by his bedside and hold his hand as he left this world even though I knew he would be in a better place. My life as I knew it ended and has never been the same.

For the first time in my life I truly understood the scene in Sleepless In Seattle where the Father character had to remind himself to breath.

I still after 11 years without him, I have not fully recognized a normal day for myself.

It is a hard thing to find a new way in a life you do not know.

Some days I'm ok with that but other days it is hard.

If I have learned one lesson... It is: To live life to the fullest. Enjoy every moment like it is your last.

Don't be afraid to love and cherish those important to you every moment you can... it may be your last time together.

Sorry this is one of those harder days.

In my opinion "Love like you have never loved before and keep on keeping on"!

Nana