THE WORLD KEEPS TURNING
In the mid-60s, I was working for the Lexington Herald-Leader and one of my co-workers was a woman named Mary = we had met at the training center where we both were hoping to be hired by the Herald-Leader if they bought the new machines we were training on and they eventually did buy the machines and hired both of us and so here we were.
She was about 10 years older than me, the mother of two and a husband who had been seriously injured in an accident he was working at during the summer break when he was a teacher. He could no longer teach and Mary took over as the breadwinner. Mary and I became close friends and I still miss her all these years later, if she is alive, she would be in her early 80s. I hope she is still among us, because death is one of those finite events that no one can escape.
A very fragile thread separates us from death and when it's broken, there is nothing we can do but go to be with our Heavenly Father. I'm ready to go, ready for God to come and take my hand and lead me to my Home. I'm ready but I'm also scared. I don't want to go anytime soon, but I find myself, when the MS kicks in really badly, I wish I could go to sleep and not wake up, to end the suffering and pain and mental demons I fight on a daily basis. When I do wake up, I can only see out of my right eye = lost the sight in my left eye in October 2014, another demon to deal with.
Toward the end of the 60s, Mary came in to work one day, very somber-looking, not smiling, but ready to go to work. After a while, she told me that her husband Jim had died that morning! And she still came to work! That was her way of coping.
She said, "When Jim died, I thought the world would stop for maybe a minute and honor him at his passing, but it did not, it kept on turning, it keeps on moving, no matter what, it doesn't stop for anything." And that's all she said that day.
What she said stayed with me, I still remember that day and I felt the same thing when my Mom died in 1971. The world keeps on turning and you go through the motions to keep up with it.
Since moving to Kentucky in 1997, I have lost friends, family, acquaintances, pets = to natural causes, accidents and disease. And not one time did the world stop turning and acknowledge any of these passings = maybe it should have, but it did not.
I know I'm not invincible. It will happen to me one day and I can't stop it. I have made my final arrangements, wrote my own obit and dotted all the "i"s and crossed all the "t"s. I'm eventually going to view my memorial video with the pictures I picked out and the music I picked out. I'm off to the sidelines looking at what I have done, knowing I will not be here, but looking at it like I will be. I also wrote a final column to be published by the Herald-Leader after I am gone. There will be no more chapters in my life, no more pain for me to endure, no blindness for me to cope with and no more mental demons that have waged battle with me for most of my 71 years here on earth. I won some of those battles, some I did not.
I turned 71 yesterday, Friday the 13th, May 2016, but it was not a bad day = I stayed in, spent all day with my babies and looked at the clock at 12:01 a.m. on Saturday the 14th, May 2016 and knew God had given me another day to share with my babies. It has been a chilly day today, with rain and that kept me from going to the annual May Day parade. Worked the Saturday New York Times crossword puzzle, drank my coffee from BP (where I pay $2.00 worth of quarters for the Saturday paper in the vending machine) and ate my Subway sandwich of Provolone cheese, tomatoes and mayo, on toasted bread, bringing my babies a piece of chicken which I shared with some of them, the others didn't want it, they haven't acquired a taste for it.
About that time, 12:01 a.m., I was wide awake, frustrated I couldn't sleep (again!) and wishing I could close my eyes and drift away, but I couldn't. I had closed the storm door that goes to the porch and locked it for the night and turned off the porch light. Darby (Doodle) picked that time to come to where I was laying down and looked up at me with those big eyes and "meowed" = wanting out. I lost it, I don't know why, but I lost it, yelled at him, put him on the porch and closed the door, leaving him outside in the dark to keep a watch to see if the mouse that hides under the porch had made an appearance. Immediately, I felt a pang of sadness that I had yelled at him and the pain in my heart was breath-taking. I made it up to him when he came back in, but I think the world just closes in on me sometimes and I vent an anger that comes from way down in my soul about everything going on with me and I yelled out, not at Darby, but at the world around me. Can't explain that to him, but I can love him unconditionally and that I do, love him unconditionally.
Darby came to me in a very unusual way and I believe God had a hand in it = my beloved rescue Maggie had been killed in a freak accident in my house in October 2009 and I was going to my friends Susan and Darrell's house who was keeping Maggie's body for me until we could bury her that weekend. Another friend James had made a tiny wooden coffin for Maggie to be buried in. I went over to Susan's house to verify that she and Darrell would go with me to help in Maggie's funeral and before I drove up to her house, a classmate of mine was carrying this huge orange and white cat in her arms, saying "This baby is sick and hungry and he is out here just wandering around = can you take him in?" I said, "Well, I just lost one of my babies" and the classmate handed the cat to me through my open car window. He immediately started purring, putting his head down on my chest and just stayed there. I could tell he wasn't well = I took him inside Susan's house, she fed him, gave me a pet carrier for him and I took him home. All I had for him to eat at home was an Arby's sandwich I had in the car. That's where Darby got his name!
Darby (Doodle) the night I rescued him
The next day I took Darby to the vet and sure enough, he was very ill from an infection he had acquired during a fight where his nose had been badly scratched. The vet tended to him and I left him overnight. I buried Maggie the next day, with the help of Susan and Darrell, holding a ceremony and asking one of the people who showed up, Mary Lou (it was her property), to read some words of comfort I had found online. I held Maggie's tiny wooden coffin up to the sun and opened the lid so the sun could shine on her face one last time. She was buried with some of her favorite toys, her coffin wrapped in one of my jackets, her face toward the East, where "she would be one of the first to go" to Heaven when God welcomed her in. Under the tulip tree, I said goodbye to my baby. The day she died, it broke my heart and soul into a million pieces and they have never been put back together.
Maggie in one of her favorite places to sit
The world didn't stop for her the day she died, but I think it should have = I think it should have. I know it's not going to stop turning for me when God leads me Home, but I wish it would, just for a split second.
God walks among us and I know He will give me His hand and lead me Home when it's time for me to go. Then it won't matter if the world stops or not for me, because I will already be Home.
