Recently I re-listened to this interview. I was happy it came on the air again. So inspiring. Listen to it. Now! Are you done? Can we move on? Ok, keep this interview in mind. I'll get to it in a minute. It was just a trigger for this post.
Recently I shared Liam's final year blog with a friend, who didn't know about it beforehand. He told me it's hard for him to read because it's heartbreaking. I said I'm sorry. I meant it. I threw a really difficult subject at someone who's completely unprepared. How dumb of me. At the same time, I explained to my friend, for us there's no heartbreaking. We had to deal with every minute of the situation.
After I listened to the Joan Rivers interview I found the heartbreaking common denominator (hopefully that will be my last reference to math...). Joan's way to deal with shit is laughter. I can't say that we survived the Liam's end-of-life ordeal with laughter, but we never lost our sense of humor and we were never too shy to laugh - no matter what the situation was.
But what about heartbreak? So again:
- Liam was alive and we had to take care of her the best we could; we had to be there for her. Heartbreak was not an option.
- Meitav needed us too - often more than Liam, because Liam had the entire medical staff for herself.
- I'm not sure I understand the term 'heartbreak' in such situations. When you have a responsibility, heartbreak is, again, not an option. I will discuss it below - in different context.
So there you have it. Different people deal with different shit in different ways. I'm glad I listened to Joan Rivers. I want to learn from her not how to make life into a joke but how to be able to laugh at every situation - no matter how dark it may be. I wish I could tell her our wheelchair joke.
Liam drove a power wheelchair. And when I say 'power', believe me: It was a powerful machine. Liam's vision was "not great" (because her impaired brain didn't know how to interpret the messages from the eyes); her coordination was lacking. So driving such a powerful machine using a tiny stick was not easy. Liam being Liam loved to roam the hallways of school and chit-chat with everybody - teachers, students, others. So what do you do if you see a power wheelchair coming at you at full speed?
Every morning when I said my goodbys and kissed her, I added:
Remember, you only allow to kill one kid a day, yes?
(Liam being a smarty pants always got the joke....or did she? I forgot to count how many kids lost limbs during her reign of the hallways.)
Shortly after the funeral, even on the same day, the house was already full of laughter.
Don't misunderstand me. I'm not immune to heartbreaks and I had my fair share of them. Too many, for a matter of fact. The question is if something is or can be heartbreaking if you don't define it as such. Even if the blog is difficult to read, Is it heartbreaking? Well, it depend what you take out of it. If Liam's suffering and eventual death is the only things you took from it, then it might be. To me Liam's last year with us, including all the suffering, left us with:
- Our love and care for each other.
- Liam's incredible mental strength - right next to her fragile body.
- Liam's humor (and our's) - whenever possible and despite the situation.
- Life after Liam. BTW, there's no life "after Liam". She's with us still, in our thoughts and feelings. Every day.
- Summary: I consider myself lucky, extremely lucky, to be near Liam, suffering and death included. Ah, sure I could do without the bad stuff; I'm just saying it was what it was. It's my choice now to look at it as a tragedy or as a gift. I choose the latter.
One last inspiration: Eva Mozes Kor, such an unbelievable lady. After she've been through hell and with all the reasons in the world to be bitter and heartbroken, she chose the opposite: she chose laughter and joy; and she found forgiveness. Without forgiveness she would not have been able to find laughter. Among her main messages about forgiveness you'd find [not sure what her exact words were]: "You can't change the past...but you can change how you treat the past." I highly recommend listening to her amazing story. We can all learn so much from her. So she's another example for breaking the unnecessary link between heartbreak and happiness. But she trumps the rest of us - hands down!
Eva is a much better example and inspiration than any of us. This post was written backwards, wasn't it?
