This past weekend was hard. Saturday was the one year anniversary of the last time I ever got to speak to Bill Joe. Sunday was the one year anniversary of his death. Saturday night, my right wrist began aching, stiffened up, and swollen. Sunday it was worse. I finally remembered to check that it might be tendonosis. The symptioms fit to a "T". Recommended treatment was Ice (check), compression bandage (check), and NSAIDs. (Ibuprofen, check). Interestingly, one noted precursor of some attacks of tendonosis was stress/ emotional distress. (Check).
I wore the compression bandage while awake, removing it for sleep. Wore it to work Tuesday, removed it on arrival home. It was significantly better last night. This morning, I was almost back to square one...
So. Last night I took two chlortabs before bed. Those things knock me out.
One of the boys woke me at something past 10. I wondered why Tom didn't wake me before he went to work? I was LATE! Who was on the phone?
Wait... maybe I wasn't late, I was just disoreinted. It was after 10... but still night. I hadn't been in bed too long at all.
The phone call was from the step mother of my friend Robin Craig. She wanted to let me know Robin had passed away a short while before. I had sent Robin a card in the hospital, after a mutual friend let me know Robin was hospitalised for long term care. I don't know what caused her to be hospitalised.
Robin and I had known one another since we were in Mrs. Phillips second Grade class at West Hurst Elementary. We would of been 8 years old at the time. Robin and I are two days apart in age- me the elder!
In high school, Robin and I took most of the same classes. I was asked to be Matron of Honor at her wedding in April, 1981. The wedding happened to have been on my due date, so Robin found another person to ask. It was good she did, as I was in the hospital in (false) labor when she walked down the aisle. Bill Joe was born on the 29th, just a couple days later. Robin was Bill Joe's God-mother.
We lost track of one another for a few years, but had re-established our friendship by mid 1989, shortly before I moved to Oklahoma. Robin and I wrote back and forth regularly, until the internets came along. Then we switched to email and Instant Messaging! (Still we almost always remembered to send one another a birthday card! Forgetting one another's birthday was like forgetting our own!)
Robin never got to have children. Her Juvenile Diabetes caused her to drop into a coma during her only pregnancy. As she lay unconscious, her husband had the doctors abort her baby, to save her life. It took many years for Robin to come to grips with that. Today, I know she has met that baby for the first time. (Her husband later left her, citing he wanted children as the cause for his desertion.)
In the last decade, Robin found the Lord. She was full of the love of God, and never failed to let her light shine. She cried with me over Bill, but also reminded me, before we are born, God knew the number of our days. Whether I was ready or not, God already knew the number of his days. Looking back over our last email conversations, Robin had made peace with her life. She had been disappointed at not having children of her own, but accepted that she had what God intended for her to have. She was good with what He had given her.
In some ways, it seems like this is just "too much". In the past year, Bill passed on. Then my friend Whitney lost two separate pregnancies, my son and his wife, one. My good friend Laurie passed away after giving birth to a healthy baby boy. My brother Roger left us behind, My aunt Thelma, and now my 'oldest' friend Robin.
None of us know the numbering of our days. Don't take them for granted.
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