Missing Links
We miss the ones we’ve loved and lost from day one. It is quite possible to continue to miss them for months and years, perhaps even a lifetime. One thing that will not make itself immediately apparent is the impact of that one persons life on our own. It might be years down the road before we come to grips with what they added to our life, how they effected us by simply passing through our lives.
One thing we all tend to struggle with is the big ‘Why?’ Why are we here? What is our purpose? How do I matter in the big picture?
I want to make it clear that no matter whom you are, no matter your social or financial status, that your presence on earth does have meaning and impact. When we lose people that are close to us to tragic circumstances, including but definitely not limited to death, we tend to question this most heartily. Why was my loved one taken and I was allowed to stay? This happens especially in situations where a car or plane accident kills many and leaves few behind. It happens when there is a natural disaster where one neighbor survives while the people next door are killed horrifically. When the terrorist attack happened in New York City and Washington D.C. there were many people who didn’t, for one reason or another, make it to work on time, or took that day off for something seemingly normal. After the attacks happened those same people were left with those same questions. Why was my cab delayed and I didn’t get to work on time? Was it coincidence that today was the day I had the doctors’ appointment that kept me out of those towers? One simple change in a daily schedule had saved a few lives.
I am not going to make guesses about whether fate or destiny has played a part in any of this. I am not going to speculate about coincidence verses specific life paths. What I am going to do is try to show you that you as an individual has already played a part in being a very important link in the world. I am going to try to explain to you how in just living your life day to day, you have already had an impact on your family, your friends, your city, your state, your country and your world.
On the day that you were born, you were irreversibly linked to several people instantly. Those people being your mother, your father, your siblings, and the doctor who delivered you and the nurses in attendance. Imagine for a moment, the doctor who delivered you was also in this position at one point. He or she was born and without seeming like he or she had an impact on the world, a doctor had just been born. That doctor has probably saved the lives of at least a couple of children if they are new to the profession. If they are seasoned warriors of the delivery room, they perhaps have saved a hundred lives, maybe even more. Maybe one of those lives they saved will also be a doctor; perhaps one of the lives they saved will be the scientist who discovers the cure for cancer. Perhaps they helped to save the life of the person you will eventually buy your first car from, or your first home. The caring individual, who gave you a thousand dollars off your car, because you just couldn’t afford the asking price, was delivered somewhere today. It goes without saying that you just never know. Those are the more obvious links.
What about when you were a little kid? Maybe one summer you had a lemonade stand, and another neighborhood kid came by, seen you making money for that bike you were saving for, and that inspired him to be more ambitious. Maybe that kid will be the worlds next self made billionaire. You won’t always know the effect you may have on people around you, but believe me, even the smallest thing you might do can affect someone, and it may affect their entire life.
In 1937 and 1938 a couple of babies were born that had this effect. Those two babies were married when they were 18. A few years later they were expecting their own baby. That baby was stillborn. Even that baby affected the rest of my life. In 1973 another baby was born. That baby’s mother had given her up for adoption at birth. That baby whose life was cut so short inspired what are now my parents to adopt children. They adopted my two older sisters as well. If that baby had not died, perhaps my parents wouldn’t have chosen to adopt. I would have different parents and be a different person. I would not likely have had the same life, I would not have gotten the chance to know the beautiful people who have walked through and passed out of my life, and they wouldn’t know me. I would likely not have had the same experiences; I would likely not have had the inspiration to write this book and if you are reading it, then even your life was altered by events that happened way back in 1937 and 1938. Understand now?
If you are lucky then you may get to see the effect your life has had on others. I want to make an example out of a woman whom I admire. There once was a girl who was born dirt poor. Those are her own words that describe her financial beginnings. Someone, somewhere in her life inspired her to believe that she could be more then just some dirt poor girl who lets life whisk her away where it may. She not only rose to the challenge but she conquered it. Some people think that it’s the physical things that define what is within us. It is not. She has proved that time and time again. This famous woman has made incredible impact on our society. Thousands of lives she has helped are the same here, people who are inexplicably linked just by simply being born. Not only does this prove my theory on our links with one another, but it proves in solid concrete why we can not judge people by what is on the outside. Who would have thought that the dirt poor girl would have changed our world?
I often hear younger people, and sometimes even adults, say that they are nothing. That is never true. Your life, no matter what path you have allowed it to take has altered something, somewhere. All we want to do is make sure when we are altering things that they are for the good of us, the good of the world and the people in it.
A daytime talk show host which I admire was diagnosed with M.S. and has in turn used his illness to help many others who have found themselves in the same boat, just lacking the power of a voice that these two admirable people have been given. He could have kept silent and never offered a helping hand or a soft shoulder to those who he has now been able to help, but he didn’t.
The impact of these two figures in what will be our history is phenomenal. These are only famous examples and I only bring them up because it is their compassion for human life and human suffering that brings them to be the shining links to humanity that they are. Not everyone that has this type of impact is famous. My parents are far from famous but they have made the same impacting sacrifices that millions of others make everyday. It is when we take the word, I, out of our vocabulary that we can begin to heal emotionally.
I lost Paul, I lost Alex and I lost Rob. I felt that way for years and years. It was the loss I felt I had suffered that astounded me, and crippled me for so long. The day I stopped to realize that everyone had lost them, the world had lost them and that links had been forever broken, that I started to heal.
When Paul died I swore that I wouldn’t abandon Tom’s friendship. Paul had been very popular and there were always kids in Tom’s house to see him. Tom had been disabled years before in a work accident so he was always available to us, always there. Paul’s friends became his friends. After the funeral, so many people just faded away. They stopped coming by Tom’s house. They stopped caring so much it seemed. They did what I feared I might someday do if I didn’t keep the promise I had made to myself. They faded away, it was as if they had forgotten. It seemed like they had forgotten what had brought us all together so closely. They forgot that without Tom, Paul would have never graced our lives and taught us all those very important lessons. To this day, over a decade later, I am still close friends with Tom. I could never forget his selfless act that day in the hospital. In return for that selfless act, I have pledged my honor and loyalty to this man who had lost his only son, his only child at the time. In doing so, I feel I have honored completely the love and respect I had for Paul. I feel like Paul would be angry if he could see how some of his friends had abandoned his own father, who was like a father to all of us for so long. Paul will never have reason to be angry with me for that reason; I will be there for Tom forever. Those who faded away are sadly making broken links out of themselves. Just because Paul is no longer there does not mean that the link was broken. It is only broken by the lack of communication thereafter. Paul was a strong link that held us all together for many years. A lot of our friends disappeared after his death. So many broken links, so many more people we will never get to know, or know well. In my eyes those are now so many friends who will no longer introduce us to their new friends and create more and possibly needed and lasting links. That in itself is a whole new tragedy to me. It is important to our growth as human beings to overcome the pain that keeping these links intact may cause. Of course for the first couple of years it was hard to see Tom and not think about Paul. It was hard to sit there pretending like the reason we even knew each other at all was forever lost to us. These days it doesn’t hurt at all. It brings happiness and healing each and every time I visit with him. I am sure my presence has done the same for him. At first bringing pain because of course I had to remind him of his lost son, but in recent years, friendship and understanding, sharing life and sharing love. I was also able to share with him something that had impact on him. I told him the story of Ashley and her conversation in her room that day. The conversation I was and am still sure she was having with her father. Tom, who just like Paul, didn’t usually show a lot of emotion, or a lot of reaction to things, was clearly touched by my story. I felt privileged to be the one to tell him of it. I shared in something with a grandfather that gave him hope that he had long needed. I was getting a chance to give back some of what he gave me that day, so long ago in the hospital when I crumbled.
Alex’s ex-girlfriend and I didn’t make our link until almost 12 full years after he was gone. The link was not weakened by time. We found in each other the hope and faith that people continue to feel love and honor for their loved ones they have lost, long after the loss has occurred. Finding her did bring back fresh pain and the feeling of loss and loneliness. It brought something far greater with it though. It brought an almost complete healing, something I had been desperately seeking for years. It brought with it my faith in the fact that there was still a force at work. A force I had called an angel of mine while he had still lived. Best yet it brought with it something I had been wary of putting into concrete until that moment. The apparent end is not the absolute end. I was always skeptical about that.
Until the deaths of my loved ones I was so horribly frightened that the end was the end. You live and then you are gone, into blackness or void. Having seen the things I have seen, having witnessed the things I have witnessed and having learned the lessons that I had no choice but to learn, I have realized that the end is not the absolute end and that the journey called life has just been a taste of what is to come. No, I am still not sure what comes after and I no longer care. What I am sure of is that I have had something not of this earth, or not of this earth any longer, to protect me through all of these years. It has brought me to the point where I understand the meaning of friendships and love. It has taught me that those do not end in death. Those links are not broken simply because we can’t see the ones who caused them anymore. That love never fades; it never disappears, unless we allow it. I will never allow the love or the memories to fade, because those are what healed me in the end. The letters I wrote, the journals I kept were just footprints in the sand. In the end, whether it was angels or an all encompassing deity, or even just my faith in my feelings and friends, those are what carried me, when I could not carry myself. The memories, the ones that caused so much pain and sorrow in the beginning of these losses, were the ones, are the ones I get so much joy from today. Never block those out. Those are the only links you have that will carry you, into a new day, a new time and a new place where you will eventually find your own joy again.
I used to laugh bitterly in those moments of deep pain when I realized that I had a name that was so ironic for me. Joy. I had so very little of it as a child, and even less as a young adult. It took so many pain filled years to realize that it was there all along, I had but to get off my rear end and find it for myself. It was hidden inside of the anger I had at the loss of my friends. It was covered by bitterness that I had allowed myself at feeling so cheated out of love so many times. It was just like Janet’s message from Rob so long ago, I was keeping it out. I was blocking it out, because in my heart, feeling happiness and joy at such an ugly period in my life seemed to do a disservice to my lost friends. In fact it is just the opposite. I do not believe that our lost loved ones want us to be in pain, they do not want us mourning them while losing our own selves. It was our real selves they loved was it not? It was the person we were before we dealt with their losses that was why they loved us so much. The real disservice we can do to them is to alter what we are and what we could be, in their names. The worst dishonor we could do to them is to tell ourselves we can not get over this, we can not live without them, and we can not ever love again because of them. By believing so little of ourselves, we are taking from them the honor they deserve. The honor they gave us when they called us friend.
When I die, I want there to be a huge party after my service, just as there was for all 3 of my friends who passed on. I do not want people to mourn my death but enjoy what part in their lives I had played. I do not want them to use it as an excuse to become one of those missing links; I want them to use it as an excuse to be a better link in the future. My love for my friends taught me a world, a lifetime of knowledge. Imagine how much I could have appreciated them had I known these lessons ahead of time. I hope that sharing my pain and my losses has mentally prepared at least one person for what they have to face. I hope it gives them the skills they need to go forward in honoring their lost loved ones, not backward in their lives and drowning in hopelessness. The easiest lessons we will ever learn in life are the ones we learn from one another’s mistakes. The hardest ones are the ones we refuse to learn from when they are indeed, our very own mistakes.