Hello, and welcome to my weekend musings.
I’m not a huge fan of writing sad posts but there’s no avoiding it this weekend. Unfortunately my grandmother passed-away this week after being diagnosed with lung cancer last year. Cancer is fast and even though she hadn’t touched a cigarette in over thirty years, the damage had already been done.
Weddings and funerals, those are two things you really can’t miss. One of my biggest regrets in life is not being able to attend the funeral of a friend who passed-away at the age of 25. When he passed-away I think the emotions were so strong that mentally I couldn’t get myself into the right place to go to his funeral. Yes, it would have been very complex to get there and work it out but honestly looking back, there are no excuses, I should have been there.
So now, in the midst of our insanely busy lives we find ourselves heading-into the polar vortex and landing in NYC the night before the Super Bowl. However this time around I know how it feels to miss a funeral and I know I never want to feel that way again. On top of that, both weddings and funerals are a time for family to come together and support each other.
Tonight at midnight after landing in NYC and driving upstate I’ll be with my Mom and the rest of her family. While it’s easy to say “they lived a good life” and focus on the positive, there’s no getting around how sad loss really is. I’m not sure my grandfather has been alone in the last fifty years and I can’t imagine what he’s feeling right now but I am so grateful that we can be here for him now and in the future.
The lesson here is a sad and powerful one and hopefully this post can change the life of one of my readers. Smoking cigarettes will kill you and if you can stop for 30+ years and still die of lung cancer that means that any of you who smoke really should stop immediately. Here’s the thing though, don’t do it for yourself, do it for your family.
Sure, quitting is hard, but I can tell you that the alternative is much harder. So if you do smoke, next time you see your husband or your wife just look at them and ask yourself, what their life would be like without you? If that doesn’t make quitting easier then nothing else possibly could.
I have closed comments on this post as I really don’t want a bunch of comments saying “sorry for your loss” etc. Not that I don’t appreciate things like that but that’s not what this post is about. If just one of my readers quits smoking after reading this and lives 10, 20, or 30 years longer then my grandmother can change a life even after she has passed away.
As always thanks for reading and I hope this post doesn’t put a damper on your weekend. Just know that life is so precious and our time on this planet so finite. So hold your loved-ones a little closer and if you’re doing something in your life that you know might be slowly killing you, I hope this serves as a wake-up call, not for what you will lose, but what they will lose living life without you.
