Light Bulbs & Loved Ones Lost

You never know.

You just never know.

You never know when this phone call might be the last one you have with your loved one.

You never know when that text will be the last one you send to your best friend.  

You never know when a mindless, careless word will be the last you utter to a person who means so much to you.

Life doesn't always afford us the opportunity to make peace, to say goodbye, to say the words we've always been too afraid to say.

As I scrolled through my text threads yesterday, and I stumbled across the last text conversation I had with my father.  

We were discussing light bulbs.

All the bulbs in the lighting fixture in our kitchen had burned out and he had told me that he had extra that I could have.  They are the long, skinny kind, (the kind you normally see in an industrial building or an office), so he sent me pictures of them to make sure they were the kind I needed.  One of the pictures was taken by my step-mom and shows him holding up the bulbs so I could see the pronged ends.

That was the last digital or written communication (in other words, the last enduring conversation) I had with my father.

I did see my dad a time or two after that.  The final time I saw him was, I believe, Wednesday, February 3rd, exactly two weeks before his death.  We played Euchre while we ate lunch.  He looked a little tired and weak--just not himself--but I had no reason to think that he would be lying in a casket the next time I saw him.  

I didn't get a chance to say goodbye.  

I am blessed to have had a relatively good relationship with my father.  I am not plagued by regret or uncertainty.  Still, there are things I would like to have said to and heard from him.  It would have been nice to have had one last conversation with him.  It would have been nice to know that we were having our last conversation.     

It doesn't help that I was never able to say goodbye to my mom, either.  She spent the last year of her life physically and mentally impaired, the result of a stroke (the last in a series).  Her death came after a choking incident one night while I was away with some of my siblings watching the The Return of the King.  It was the Friday night that Christmas vacation began.  They revived her, but she passed on Christmas Day and was buried in the cemetery down the road by the time we went back to school.

I know it's cliché, but, like stereotypes, most clichés exist for a reason.  At any given moment, your life could be changed instantly by the loss of a spouse or a child, a parent or a friend.  More than that, you yourself could be reshaped in the blind of an eye by a heart attack, a car wreck, an act of violence, or a freak accident.    

Don't take people for granted.

Love your loved ones. 

Relish the moments you have with them.

Live with an awareness of the fragility of life.

This is apparently a lesson I had to learn twice.