SHI BLOGS TOO

I feel stupid

I really feel stupid. I haven't been blogging that much lately or reading as many other blogs as I normally do. I sort of caught up on my own blogging...but when going blog reading...I discovered that runningwolf04 had lost her Dad to the cancer that consumed him! I got tears in my eyes reading this news in her blog entries. How, awful I felt that I had not known sooner of her great loss.

I sent a cNote off to her immediately. She responded and seems to be taking her terrible loss as good as can be expected. She wants to go back to visit her family even more now though.

I know where she is coming from. When we lose someone we love that dearly it effects our family as a whole. We come closer together in our suffering and we let our love show with much more meaning. I know when I lost a son to a tragic death in 1997, it brought all of the rest of my children so much closer together. Then a few years later in 2001 when they lost their Dad due to heart failure it just tightened that family knot up even more. My kids are regular troopers when it comes to mourning the loss of a loved one. But, they all celebrate their lives by giving love more freely and realizing what is most important to them. They seem to have their priorites in order and for that I am forever thankful. They are grown adults well into their thirties and one of them (the oldest son) is fourty-five. At an age where most siblings lack the comfort and closeness of a relationship with their sister or brother, these kids of mine keep in touch on an almost daily basis. One always knows what the other one has been up to. Actually, that can be a good thing. It is something that they have been able to pass down to their children - the importance of family.

I can see this importance of family in all of my grandchildren. Every single one of them is close to their parents, their siblings, their aunts, their uncles, their cousins, and their grandparents. There's never a visit without hugs and kisses. Never a phone call without an "I love you" or "I miss you."

It brings to mind how my own mother would never wash the fingerprints of her grandchildren off of her slider door whenever their visit to her house ended. She would just leave them there to look at for atleast a week.

I am proud to know that I am a part of her Legacy and have been able to pass that down to my grandchildren.

Here's a photo taken of my kids and myself in 2002.