Life is given...and can be taken away...

After doing my normal “morning stuff” I started to move stuff around in our new room so I can do some more work on it. I’m clearing off the desk to put my computer back on it and I find some legal documents.

What the Hell are these?

So picking them up, I read them. It’s not that I’m nosey (although…I am), it’s that I don’t want to throw away any important papers.

They were my Dad and Step-Mother’s living will. I had to sit down and read them fully at this point. With all of the news about the “feeding tube woman” it shouldn’t have been a surprise. It’s another sign that I am getting older, I guess.

Let me be honest for a minute. I was not always the best daughter. Shocking, I know, and I didn’t have the best family. Yet, at this present time, I have built a good relationship with my Dad and my Step-Mom…Hell, I consider her more of a Mom than my birth-mother. It SCARES me to death to think about either one of them passing away. See!! I can’t even bring myself to say the “D” word.

I pretty much knew what they wanted. It’s another thing to read their living wills and see it in their own writing, “I do not wish to be resuscitated. I do not want to be kept alive by artificial means if there is no chance of recovery.” On my Dad’s he simply wrote, “No heroic measures.”

Why didn’t Rogue Wit tell me about this?

I understand why they are filling them out now, yet it chills me to the bone. I can’t think about either one of them being GONE. That thought makes my chest tighten and my eyes moist.

It doesn’t shock me thinking about my real mother dying. She keeps herself right on the edge of it all…she’s always been “about to die” of something or another (whether real or imagined—uhm, that is “made up”).

Not my Dad…No, he never missed a day of work when I was growing up. He went even if he was as sick as a dog. The only times he missed and really he didn’t miss them because he scheduled to be off for it, was when he had to have some skin cancer removed. He’d having a lot of health problems right now and…I choose not to think about it.

I know, I’m a coward.