The fortune cookie read, “In the near future, you will discover how fortunate you are.”
I seriously doubt that the fortune inside the cookie had anything to do with anything although it surely runs alongside where I am in this crazy life-transition that I’ve entered into.
It’s really interesting how life has a way of unfolding. And we haven’t a clue what the unfolding will bring as time performs its wonders.
That’s how this eight-day trip I’ve just returned from happened. It just happened. It started with a very short phone conversation on Monday and early Tuesday morning Fred was headed to a rendezvous point in Lucedale enroute to the Ozark Mountains then on to explore around Springfield, Missouri.
The Almost World Famous Beetle Bailey has been a dear brother for a lot of years now. And now, this side of all that wandering through the valleys of his grief and my own, we’ve teamed up as road buddies. Look out world. Beetle in Big Red. Me in Fred. Talk about a hoot! There’re antics everywhere we go.
I told some gals behind the counter at one of our “necessary” stops that we were a couple of geriatrics that had escaped from the cage and were out just wandering around. Ha. I’m not ready for the cage. I’ve got rambling in my bones.
It didn’t take long after Shirli and I got together for us to begin regularly using the phrase, “I love my life.”
We loved our life together. We loved the individual lives that were ours to live in freedom knowing that the greatest desire of the other was for the other. Ah. What a blessed man I am to have known such freedom to love … such freedom to simply “be”. I think this being business, this “just happily being” without the physical and emotional comforts of having Shirli alongside me, has been the toughest aspect of this transition.
It was out there somewhere on the road coming back from Missouri when that phrase began floating around in my thoughts. I haven’t so much as thought it once since discovering Shirli’s terminal diagnosis and prognosis. But, out there on the road, that thought would swim by occasionally leaving behind a slight wake that lapped the shorelines of my memory.
“I love my life.”
And then, as timely as timely can be, that FM station out of Who Knows Where, Missouri played Kris Kristofferson singing “Why Me Lord?” Yeah. I shed a few tears as he sang those words in my hearing. I tried to sing along but was so emotional that I could not carry a tune. Then I verbalized the words as a prayer of thanksgiving.
“I love my life. Thank you, Lord, for being so good to me, problem child that I am.”
Yeah. God’s problem child. I have no problem admitting what I truly am. But the contrary thing is how He blesses and takes such good care of me despite being the problem child that I am. Amazing. Grace. What a reality, one that truly baffles me … one that truly brings me to my knees when considering the Grand Scheme of things.
Grief is a contrary bastard.
It’s not some simple little five-stage thing that we pass through a stage at a time until the stages are behind us. It’s not chronological. There is nothing chronological about it. It’s like a huge bowl of spaghetti that’s constantly moving on its own. I do think those five stages are individually stacked full of assorted degrees that we work through on grief’s own time schedule. We’ve got pitifully little control over the process. The process owns us and we are subjective to it. It messes with our heads and direly aggravates everything going on in the seat of our bludgeoned emotions. Wherever that seat is. Personally, I think it’s in our souls.
I am beginning to discover afresh just how fortunate a man I really am. And it is such a multi-layered fortune, one that is full of deeply meaningful relationships with people who are extremely dear to me and grow dearer by the day.
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