Thank you

We are going to my cousin's wedding this weekend and then on to visit my sister and her family. It will be a bittersweet day as my cousin's father, my Uncle Dick, passed away in February and he is missed more than words can say. So as his son gets married his spirit will be felt but his physical absence will be hard to bear. My Uncle was one of those people that everyone loved and he loved us right back. He had the gift of making everyone feel that they were his favorite when in fact he just loved us all so much. His cancer diagnosis was sudden and his death a short five months later. He encouraged us that it would all be okay even when I think he knew inside that it would not be. Many lessons have come about as a result of his death but the biggest one is examining in close detail how I want to spend my days. I realize now more than ever before that there will be an end to my life. It makes me think of this line from a Mary Oliver poem

"What will you do with your one wild and precious life?"

It is wild.

It is precious.

What will you do with it?

It won't last forever.

How we spend our days will be how we have spent our life. I see places where I could do better. I am working to improve these things so that when I say my final goodbye to this world I will be proud of the mark that I have made, the love that I have given and received, the memories that I have made and the lives that I have touched.

I would gladly trade these lessons to sit around one more campfire with my Uncle Dick.

How would we cherish something if we knew it was the last time?

How can we live being so present in each moment?

How can we take our problems in stride and focus more on the joy?

How do we pay the mortgage, feed the kids, walk the dogs and keep our marriage alive while we stay mindful of this wild and precious thing called our life?

I am working on the answers and the one thing I am certain of is that GRATITUDE is the main ingredient. It is so easy to say thankyou to the waitress or the bank teller but I am not talking about that. I am talking about appreciation. Living from a place of gratitude does change the way I look at my life. I learned awhile back to start saying thankyou to everything. Including the hard stuff. It reminds me that my life is exactly that....MY life and I would not want to trade my joys or my sorrows with anyone else. I try to make a mental list of what I am grateful for each day and I realized just now that I am so incredibly thankful to experience this grief.

It means I loved someone so much and they loved me back.

Out of all the uncles in the world I got this one and he was extraordinary.

Do you want to know another thing on my list today?

YOU.

I have been receiving some personal notes along with the public comments that make me feel so encouraged to continue writing. This means so much to me. I love to write but what I really love is knowing that my words mean something to someone else.

So thank you for that.

In Gratitude,

Kimberly