Forgive Me

                                                Forgive Me

I get it honestly – this death wish of mine.  It’s not that I’m actually suicidal like my cousin who hanged himself at 19 or my father who drank himself into his grave at 42.  It’s a gentler thing. 

Admitting to my 103 year old mentor that at almost 73, I’ve already had enough, she giggled with a family memory. “Your grandmother and your mother and I were picking strawberries one hot summer day, when your grandma suddenly looked up at the sky and said, “Lord, is this the day?”

Knowing full well what Gram meant, my dear role model teased, “The day for what?”

After the reply, “The day  He’s going to take me,” my heroine laughingly quipped, “I thought we had to get these strawberries picked and to market.  We haven’t got time for philosophizing!”    Even though this fun-loving woman admits that she too wants to die soon, she claims it’s only so she can remember to tell her husband all the wonderful things that have happened since he died.

I will always hear in my memory’s ear, my Mom at ninety-one, saying to me when I visited her in her nursing home, “I’m mad at God, this morning.” 

“Oh Mom, why are you mad at God?”

“Because I asked Him again last night to take me in my sleep and He doesn’t ever listen to me”,

My darling cousin, even as she prayed for life, just days before she died at 57, waiting for a new heart,  had to concur with my query,  “Why do we struggle so much to keep our ailing bodies going when we profess to have so much faith in a blissful eternity without them?” 

The next time I condemn myself for not being grateful that I’m still alive, I’m going to offer me full out forgiveness by remembering, “The wish to die is in my genes!”