Tragedy doesn't change a person

My mother-in-law, Priscillia, is in very bad shape and today I have learned a few very valuable lessons through all of this. First of all my living will is going to become very long and specific. There will be nothing left up for interpretation. I do NOT want to end up being kept alive in order to ease someone else’s guilt or pain. Most of all, though, I have learned that most of the time it doesn’t really matter what you do with your life or how much you do for other people. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t do good or that it doesn’t make a difference, it does. In the end though, no one seems to care or remember. There are exceptions, of course, and luckily I am married to one of those but for the most part all that people are concerned about is really themselves. They like to talk a good game and pretend that they care but really they only care about themsleves and how it will affect them. How some people manage to live with themselves will never cease to amaze me. I’ve also learned that if it is allowed there are also great things that can come from tragedy and I hope that this will be the case here. There is forgiveness that needs to be accepted and love that needs to be shown. Hopefully it is not just a temporary reprieve and things can genuinely be changed. There are also things that tragedy just seems to make worse too. You can’t change who people are and when they are not where they should be in their lives and with God these times only seem to make that more evident.

I have edited this post on April 9th, 2008 not because what I had written was untrue but because at this point those things no longer matter. Everyone must deal with their own grief and their own consequences for the things past. There is no need for me to rehash how things happened or why, they happened.