This is a loaded question and not an easy one for a mother…
If I were a seventeen year old girl who felt like I had sat around and wasted my entire life, my outlook would be very different than it is through the eyes of a 35 year old mother of two.
There are a few things that immediately pop to mind…
I would hug my children constantly, tell them I love them every ten minutes and put the school books in a cabinet for that last year.
I would stay up late into the night after they have gone to bed and write letter after letter after letter, telling them how much I love them and how important they are to me.
I would spend every second of every day that I possibly could giving them the best memories I possibly could and I know my mother would do everything she could to help us do that – and not just because she would want to spend as much time as possible with me too…
The thing that has to be noted here is that there is a tremendous differences between the outlook we have on life and the outlook those in this book have.
For the family that has to say goodbye to Parvin, it has always been a given. They always knew they had a certain amount of time before Parvin’s last year.
They knew they would lose her. …and when.
This is not unlike the situation you find with the family of a terminal cancer patient (also a very personal point for me right this minute…).
However… even in the case of a person who is facing a terminal disease of some sort, the difference remains – We never know how much time we’ll have…
Even someone who is told they have months to live could die within a week, or they could live three years longer than projected.
And a perfectly healthy person can drop dead suddenly of a heart-attack or an aneurysm. They could be driving to work and get hit by a bus or be flying cross-country and their plane go down…
Every one of us is technically living on borrowed time and we never know when that time is going to be up.
In most ways I think this is actually more difficult.
If you know the number of your days, you know you have time to accomplish things.
Ironically enough, I think we forget all too often that our days ARE numbered… we just don’t know the number.
Not too long ago, I watched a movie made about a real-life story of a couple who had a young son who died from cancer. They spent months and months in one hospital and then another and then another. They tried one thing and then another and then another – only to find that all of the things they had tried had no effect whatsoever on the disease that was working to steal their baby boy from them.
This movie shows just how important it is to cherish every moment we have with our children. It is important that we do not take them for granted and it is important that we live every day as if it could be our last.
And that is what I intend to do! …because one day, it will be.
JC Morrows 