Life is Hard

M's doing better than expected. We spent a long day yesterday. Left the house at 6:30 and headed down. Ken, my son, drove us down in his big 5-seater Dodge Ram and it was so nice to leave the driving to him. We stopped on the way home to get some water so M could take some pain pills and I handed the clerk a ten-dollar bill and she gave me $4+ in change!! For 2 bottles of water and one fountain coke, $6!!!!! I about passed out! Anyway we got him home just before 5:00 yesterday and he's doing very well, considering. He spent the night in his chair and I was going to sleep on the couch in case he needed me but decided at the last minute that I needed to go to bed if I was going to get any rest at all. When he's sick and spending the night in his chair he leaves the TV on all night. I wouldn't have gotten any sleep. I took Pepper to bed with me and told M to just call me if he needed me (I had his urinal there by the chair so he wouldn't have to get up and try to go to the bathroom by himself) and Pepper would bark if he heard M call. We'd never done that before but I was pretty sure Pepper would bark, and he did! Made the best little alarm for Michael. When I sleep without my hearing aids I can't hear anything once I go to sleep and we had been trying to think of some way for him to wake me up if he needed me and I thought about Pepper. He was a good little alarm for me. Anyway as long as he keeps up with the pain meds, he's doing fine.

Merle, my niece's son, has not died yet but they expect him to by this evening. They had tried pulling him off his life support yesterday but his body automatically tried to breathe for him which showed that the brain was not 100% dead. So they put the tubes back in and are waiting 24 hours and they'll try to pull the tubes again. They don't expect his body to involuntarily try to breathe again and when that happens they will take him to the OR and harvest his organs. Poor Merle. He had so much life still ahead of him. Like Richie, it's all such a waste. Merle came back positive for opiates, heroin, and weed. And whatever he took he just took too much. Richie swallowed 161 over-the-counter sleep aid pills. He had driven to all the pharmacies around the area buying all the boxes of pills he could get his hands on. He definitely intended not to wake up. And he didn't. Merle's was an accident. I don't know which is more painful for the survivors. It really doesn't look like we're going to get the miracle we are praying for but we continue to pray. It just breaks my heart that Laurie's up there going through all this all by herself. I think she is feeling a bit overwhelmed. She was developing a migraine headache the last time she emailed anyone. No small wonder there!) She doesn't know when she's coming home, when she wants to leave him. It was just such horrible circumstances with her getting the information on Friday that she'd finally landed a good job with the state and then Saturday she got the call about Merle. She's so grief-stricken and confused right now she doesn't know which end's up. Pray for strength for her and a miracle for him.

My cat, Mulder, is still alive but he is refusing any food and only a sip of water so I know he'll slip away soon. I fully expected him to be dead when I got up this morning but he's still hanging on. I coaxed him out with a can of "people" tuna but he wouldn't even lap up the juice. Which says a lot because he dearly loves people tuna. He used the litter box and then crawled under one of M's tables in his studio. He has spent the better part of the last four days sleeping between our occasional chair and our entertainment console here in the living room. You know I really, really don't want him to die. He's just the neatest cat in the whole wide world and we all love him so much. I hope with all my heart that this isn't something running through all my cats. This will be my fourth cat to die in the last couple of years. Mister didn't have the same symptoms at all but Bill, Callie, and Pretty all died with similar symptoms. Two of them strayed up so we had no idea how old they were. Mulder is only about 10 years old. Way too young to die of "old age" for a cat. I've thought about going down into the yard and getting a hole dug next to where we buried Pretty but I just can't get myself to do that. Not yet. It's supposed to rain Friday and that'll probably be the day he dies so I'll be out there digging a hole in the rain wishing I had it already dug. There's just such a big part of me that doesn't want him to die that digging his grave is too much for me to do. Oh, I'm sick of crying! I've cried so much the past few days, I'm just sick of it. This life is so hard. There are so many sorrows, so much grief. I shutter to think what I'd do if I didn't have faith.

I better get busy and get a few things done here while M is asleep and I have the chance. As long as he's going to sleep out here I won't get any cleaning done so I'm just trying to keep up the rest of the house. I woke up this morning in the exact same position as I had when I first laid down in bed. I hadn't moved a muscle. All I had to do to make the bed was just smooth it with my hand and tuck the pillow in. I was really tired when I finally got to bed last night. I am so frustrated today. I don't want Merle to die and I don't want Laurie to grieve. I don't want to think about Richie any more and I don't want Mulder to die either. Seems like I've been on the verge of tears for days. Well, it has been days now that I think about it. Why does this life have to be so hard? I'm not expecting an answer. I'm not even sure there is one. I think of Richie and how much I miss him and I don't know which would have been worse ... lingering on life support or obviously dead as we found him. Knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was dead when I found him made it all surreal. How can it be that they're alive and then suddenly they're dead? It's totally unreal. Your mind just tells you it simply cannot be true. Here one minute then dead the next. But seeing them lingering must be something altogether different. Still unreal. Still painful. But definitely different. I wish this hadn't happened to stir up all my painful memories and regrets. The empty, unfulfilled promises of a young life rearing to go. The long hours of asking the same question over and over again ... only to realize that there's no real answer to why. I mean, Rich died of an intentional overdose of sleeping pills, that's "why!" But why it had to happen has no real answer. Someday, when I get to the other side maybe I'll have my answers. Oh, if we could just go back and change things! Losing a child is the worst pain possible because they had so much potential and we had so much of our lives invested in them. All the dreams we'd had for them. It's just unfair. I feel so bad for Laurie up there all by herself. The only ones up there for her are an exsister-in-law and an exhusband with whom she recently had fought a very bitter divorce. Another one of Laurie's sons is up there but he sort of sided against her during and since the divorce. Just a lot of broken people. That's all any of us are, really, I guess. But it helps to have a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. And she has no one. She didn't want to ever see her ex again and then to go through something like this with him by her side. Talk about insult to injury. I just can't understand for the life of me, why she's up there alone. That bothers me more than anything else. I don't know, maybe she didn't want anyone to go with her. But I can't imagine her being dropped off at the airport gate and left to fend for herself. I just don't understand.

After worrying that I wouldn't have the chance to blog this week, what with M's surgery and everything, I've had the opportunity to sit here and write quite a bit. I didn't type one of my devotionals because I didn't think I was going to have time for anything more than just a couple words. Speaking of words. You know what's really bugging me lately? I'll tell you: My use of the word 'just.' I use that word just about every sentence. I've tried to watch for it and delete it every time I get the chance but I still use it entirely too often. Just, really, so, and too. I need to really crack down on all these modifiers. I think overly dramatic people tend to use these words more than other people. I know I am overly dramatic and I really need (see what I mean) to watch my writing. I'm sorry if this has caught your attention. It is definitely a negative habit when it comes to writing. Forgive my overly dramatic version of life and I'll try to break the habit. It isn't an easy thing to do. But I'm working on it.

M said he wanted coddled eggs on toast for breakfast this morning and that's exactly what he got and he raved about them so his surgery didn't interfere with his taste buds. And now he's informed me that he wants a bowl of potato soup for lunch and then what was left of our dinner last night for his dinner tonight. There's just enough sauce for one more meal so I'll cook myself a Marie Calendar turkey pot pie. My son had thought to put dinner in the slow cooker yesterday before he left to drive us to Sacramento so last night he dropped us off and then went home and brought over his Sunday Gravy (that's what it was called) and I cooked the noodles and the bread and we all had a wonderful dinner together. I love my son so much and it's so nice to be able to share spiritual things with him now. I don't have a lot in common with most people who aren't Christian. I just don't have much to say to them. I did get some of my book read yesterday afternoon while I waited for M to get out of surgery. This was Beth Moore's book on King David and I'm pretty sure I've gotten past the hurdle I was having difficulty with. Every time I tried to read it before I just couldn't get past the second chapter. I'm well beyond that now. I also got one of my scarves finished. I knew I didn't have far to go on it and had even taken another skein of yarn with me to start the next scarf but I don't enjoy casting on and I thought it would be best if I got the new one started at home rather than at the hospital like that. So I read and wrote in my journal instead after finishing the brown scarf. The next one I knit is going to be blue. Or red, I might go with red. I'm not sure yet. I have both colors of yarn it's just a matter of deciding which one I want to knit first. I knit a lot of scarves because they're so easy and comforting to do. Ken said he'd never have the patience to sit and knit. But I find it to be soothing. Okay, not much of a blog here but I'm going to get busy with a few things. I haven't had my quiet time yet and it's so nice and quiet that I think I'll just sit on the couch and read my Bible and devotionals, instead of going outside to read them. Anyway, I do need to get something done besides this boring blog. I'm not even sure it even classifies as a blog. It's more my rambling thoughts about what's happening in my life. You know, I don't think we're supposed to find this life enjoyable. We are to find our joy in the Lord; not in this life. I don't mean that we aren't to enjoy this life at all. I just mean that our main source of joy should come from the Lord. That's where our hopes and dreams and plans should originate. No, I don't think we're supposed to enjoy this life in the sense I'm using the word enjoy. This life is filled with young people on life support machines, surgeries for broken feet, memories of a needless death, and dying cats. This life is filled with sorrow. Our relationship with the Lord is the source of our joy. Until next time...