Not Ready to Release

What do you do when they tell you you are dying?

Do you reflect on your mistakes? Do you wish you would have left him sooner; found true love with more ease? Are you grateful for the lessons you have learned? Do you hold your lover's hand to your heart and reveal all of your joy? Do you forgive your mother for never really being your mother? Do you reach out to your only child and dream of the days he smelled so new and you were able to protect him? Do you call for your grandbaby- the one you were never supposed to know but who holds your heart like no other?

In that moment, what goes through your soul? Do you release to this news, settle in and give up? Does it make your body fight harder against this prognosis?

Everything hurts and itches and burns and tears at her skin from the inside out. She cries for the life she was supposed to have. A life of love and peace and comfort with the man she waited 45 years to meet.

"I'm not ready to leave you. I don't want to leave you," she whispered while the tumors grow across her body. How could it have taken over with such speed? Her spine, liver, lungs, and brain are enflamed with the evidence of these cells that fight so hard to live that they are killing her.

He sings to her while she sleeps. That is all she does now- sleep. She awakens with great pain occasionally and then falls back into a medicated sleep. Does she know he is there? Does she remember that this man is the man that held her through her fight to quite drinking; that this is the only man she has ever trusted with her life- with her granddaughter's life? Can she hear the soul of these love songs all written to her and about her?

What do you do when they tell you you are dying and you have just begun to live?