Adventurous Mom

Posts Tagged ‘death and dying’

In a pre­vi­ous post, I dis­cussed my fer­vent pas­sion about pro­tect­ing my time after I real­ized that our time here is so lim­ited.  And as we go into the New Year, I plan to fur­ther empha­size how impor­tant I really feel like this idea is.

I first wanted to share a life les­son that I encoun­tered early.  I know that most peo­ple have expe­ri­enced friends or fam­ily mem­bers that have passed away at some point in their life and I have too.  But one per­son that affected me greatly, was a per­son that I didn’t even know.

A Hard Les­son at 21

I was 21, and it was Thanksgiving-eve.  It was another shift on my para­medic intern­ship, and I was respond­ing to a call for a “man down”.  We got these calls occa­sion­ally, and usu­ally it was a tran­sient passed out on the cor­ner.  This call was about 11:30 in the evening and it was rain­ing and cold out­side.  The call was for a man down in the street.  We drove around in cir­cles for close to 15 min­utes at the loca­tion of the described area.  We couldn’t find him.  Then we saw a bystander wav­ing us down.

In the mid­dle of the street there was a young man, face down, he appeared have been skate­board­ing and fell.  He didn’t appear injured except that he was not respond­ing and his breath­ing was very irreg­u­lar, he also was lay­ing in a pool of vomit.  We had to put a breath­ing tube into this throat to help him breathe bet­ter, bystanders said he had a dog with him and was walk­ing his dog.

We did what we could med­ically to help him and trans­ported him to the near­est trauma room.  He died later of a mas­sive brain injury.  He was 25.  My fiance (soon to be hus­band) at the time was 25 too…they looked the same. That really both­ered me.  I don’t even remem­ber the man’s name.

You don’t expect at first to be asked to try save some­one your age when you are that young (and fail).  For me, still in my early for­ma­tive years, it was a hard and fast les­son:  LIFE IS SHORT.

Up to then, I had only seen old faces pass away. Since then, I have seen faces of all ages leave.

Read the rest of this entry »

It has been an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult past cou­ple of weeks for our fam­ily and for our extended fam­ily. We lost four won­der­ful, heroic police offi­cers in the line of duty on March 21, 2009. Two were Motor Offi­cers, and two were SWAT offi­cers. I admit that as the wife of a deputy sher­iff, I had an incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult time pro­cess­ing the events and I was very, very sad. I was also sur­pris­ingly sad for the young man that lived in so much fear of the police that he felt his only choice was to kill or be killed. Our soci­ety is very sick and the sick­ness is show­ing in the way that some of these poor chil­dren are being raised.

What I have taken from this mes­sage of death is that our life should be lived as if we were dying. For those of you that are coun­try music fans, this is a fan­tas­tic Tim McGraw song from a few years back that goes a lit­tle some­thing like this:

“I went sky­div­ing
I went rocky moun­tain climb­ing
I went two point seven sec­onds on a bull named Fu Man Shu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave for­give­ness I’d been denyin’
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin’”

Okay, I’m a lit­tle country…and I love it. But seri­ously, this was my theme song a few years back and it is funny how quickly we for­get the things that shape your life. This song was instru­men­tal in my per­sonal vision of liv­ing each day fully. Hor­ri­ble events such as this recent one with our brave police offi­cers also shape our lives. It can help us to remem­ber that our days are num­bered, and every expe­ri­ence on this earth is here for us to learn from.

So when we remem­ber our friends that gave their lives so oth­ers can live in peace, let’s not let their sac­ri­fice be for naught. Remem­ber their brav­ery by cel­e­brat­ing your life. When you’re being both­ered by those small stres­sors in your day, or you want to com­plain about your neigh­bor, or you want to be grumpy.…is this the best use of your time here? Our time is meant to be lived with pas­sion, with hap­pi­ness and fully. I picked a pic­ture of me hold­ing one of my favorite bot­tles of wine (Bode­gas Aguirre Caber­net) because I truly love drink­ing wine! That is one of my pas­sions and what brings me joy. So I’d like to raise my wine glass and toast our fallen officers.…your mem­ory will not be for­got­ten, and I promise to live each day as if I were dying!