Published by I was sitting in the emergency room. My husband was having an Angio attack and we were waiting to be called back for an infusion of the new medicine that the FDA has just approved.
There were two young ladies standing at the desk when we returned from the restroom with tears rolling down their faces. There were two other ladies in the waiting room crying also. Outside you could see several young men walking around with cell phones up to their ears, and tears streaming down their faces also.
As we sat there, my heart was breaking for them. I wanted to hold them, cry with them and tell them everything would be OK. We gathered from the conversations going back and forth, that a two year old baby had just been brought in by the ambulance, and he had stopped breathing. It didn’t take long to figure out which one was the baby’s mother, the babies father, the babies grandmother, the babies great grandmother and the babies aunt.
Apparently the baby had been taking a nap with the father. The father woke up and the baby was fine, so he fell back to sleep, only for about fifteen minutes, and when he woke back up the baby wasn’t breathing. The baby didn’t make it. They diagnosed it as crib death.
We live in a small town, and we knew the family, not personally, but they lived just around the corner from us. It was so heart breaking to see them going through this horrible time in their life. I found out later, that one of the other sons and his wife had just lost their first child less than a year ago.
You could tell this family was closely knit. They were the kind of family that did things together, some of them even still living at the parents house with grandma there too!! They were a fairly large family and I was impressed by the way that they communicated and got everyone there so quickly.
At home I had time to think. Life is so fragile. Anyone of us could go at any time with out a moments notice. The bible says “he will come in the twinkling of an eye”. So could our life end, in the twinkling of an eye.
Food for thought, how many times have you said something to someone that days, or maybe even weeks later, you regretted? How many times have you told yourself you needed to call someone, and got too busy, and then find out a short while lately that they passed on, and you felt so guilty about not calling them? How many times has someone done something for you, and you tell yourself you will tell them “thank you” later, and then the chance to do so is gone? How many times could you have told someone you loved them, or you cared about them, and then they were gone?
We live in a busy, run here, run there, hurry up, make it quick world. Maybe we need to take a step back and look at the way we live.
I can remember back to my childhood when important things were still important. Family was important. Friends were important. Doing the right thing was important. Today so many of us are so hurried that we forget that there are others who would just love for us to stop for a second and notice that they are still alive. Maybe we need to clear our schedules, turn off the cell phones, turn off the TV, turn off the radio, DVD, CD player, and spend some time with those we love. Make phone calls, write letters, even send an e-mail, but let those we care about know that we care about them.
The sad fact is that a lot of us only have the guilt feelings for a short time, and then we convince ourselves that our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces and friends knew we loved them and we shouldn’t feel guilty because we didn’t follow our instincts and contact them the first time we thought about it.
In an instant, someone you care about can be gone. So many elderly people sit at home, and think that their families have totally forgotten them, and it’s true, they have to a certain degree. They have let themselves become to involved in the “Me” part of their life. They have become too involved in what they want, need and desire.
