Last night, before I climbed into bed, I finally took a moment and carefully read over the questions for the blog prompt. I decided that I would give myself the night to think and dream about what items I might place in my grave before beginning to write all my thoughts down, little did I know the emotional responses that would follow.
Before I tell you what you would find in my grave, I should explain that I have had the fortune or misfortune (depending on how you look at it) of having a few very personal close calls with death, both in 2007 and again in 2009. My mom and I often laugh (maybe more out of discomfort than anything) and say that I must have nine lives just like a cat.
In the fall of 2007, I went in for a routine procedure of having my wisdom teeth removed. My teeth had been giving me some pain for quite sometime and as I was going to be leaving for the South Pacific early in 2008, I did not want to have to put up with the soreness while I was away. I was very insistent that I should have my wisdom teeth removed (all four) in time to heal before getting on the airplane. Over reading break, I went in to the dental office for the procedure and everything appeared to have went well until I came home and had a seizure before going unconscious and stopping breathing. By the time the ambulance arrived, I had started breathing and woken up but my mom and dad both say that those thirty to forty-five seconds (that I was gone) were the longest in their lives. The doctors now believe that I had a delayed reaction to the anaesthetic that was used to put me under during the procedure.
If that close call was not close enough you probably will not believe what happened in 2009. My best friend and I decided to get away for a while and go for a girls getaway camping trip to Savary island (off the coast of Powell River) at the end of May 2009. We booked time off work, made a list of all the things that we would need and triple checked every list. Before leaving my coworkers teased me and said that the girls getaway weekend was going to be like survival of the fittest and only one of us was going to come home alive (talk about foreshadowing). The five days we spent on Savary Island went from bad to worse, everything that could go wrong did. In the morning when we were going to leave, I woke up with the worst pains in my abdomen. I took Advil to try and relieve the pain but it did not work. I was not even able to eat breakfast, which is very unlike me! We packed up camp and started the long trip back the Victoria. Steph offered to drive but I thought that driving would keep my mind off the pain in my side that was becoming almost unbearable. As I was driving down the highway, going over 120 km/hr, just outside of Ladysmith, I turned to Steph and told her that I was either going to pass out or throw up. She frantically looked ahead and found a place to pull over where we could switch seats. I did not know what was wrong with me, but I knew that something was not right. As the pain continued, I looked at Steph and joked that I was going to die. I started listing off where things were in my room, passwords on my computer, pin codes to my bank accounts and I told her the different people I wanted at my funeral. All of the things that I said were the truth despite the fact that we were trying to laugh and get home as soon as we could. The one thing that I was most certain about was that my funeral would not be a place to cry and mourn but instead a place to celebrate and laugh because that was the way I wanted to be remembered.
I will stop my story here to list a couple of the things that I told Steph (at that moment in the car) that I wanted in my burial, and as well I will add a few items that I have since decided should be included:
1) daffodils - They have always been my favourite flower since I was a little girl. My grandma (who is still alive today) and I used to walk down from her house to this big open field and spend the morning picking daffodils. Sometimes we would pick enough for me to sell at a stand on the edge of my driveway and other times we would just pick a few for her house and mine. I realize that they will not for keep for very long, as they are organic, but I would still love to have some with me.
2) a book called “The Five People you Meet in Heaven” but Mitch Albom - This book was given to me for my birthday in 2006. I have read this book over a half dozen times and is packed in my bag whenever I go travelling. The book teaches about the people who affect our lives each and everyday and whose lives we impact, though we may not realize it at the time. I would hope that after attending my funeral and learning about this burial item, more people would pick up the book and take situations and chance encounters for granted less often.
3) my leopard print blanket - I am the type of person who wants to be comfortable both in life and in death. Normally when I come home for the day and am lounging around the house, I put on my pyjamas and spread this blanket on me to keep warm.
4) pictures of my family and friends - I have a number of different photo albums and pictures but perhaps someone will put together a photo album or scrap book for me and place it in my burial. I have always loved looking at pictures because they can be interpreted so many different ways and tell so many different stories. Pictures help remind us of things that we often forget.
5) a cowboy hat - Although I was born and raised in Victoria, people always think that I must have come from Calgary or Texas because I am a country girl to the core. I love country music, I used to own a pony on my uncles farm, I travel to see rodeos and I even wore white cowboy boots underneath my fancy princess dress at graduation.
Back to my story…
Once Steph and I made it back into town, we first went to the clinic and was then quickly rushed off to the hospital for emergency surgery on my appendix on June 1, 2009. My appendix was very close to rupturing but they were able to take it out before that happened, unfortunately I had a very severe infection in my abdomen surrounding the area of my appendix. Instead of leaving the hospital after one night, I was there for four nights; and instead of being off my feet for two weeks, I was on bed rest for almost eight weeks. The recovery was very slow, and once again my mom and I had to laugh and joke. She took more than a full week off work to look after me, her giant twenty-one year old infant, as I could not do anything on my own (including walk the short distance up the hallway to the bathroom).
These two experiences (from 2007 and 2009) absolutely changed my life. Following my surgery in 2009, I wrote a “bucket list” of one hundred and one things that I want to do before I die and since then I have completed almost twenty of them. I no longer take the little moments in life and hiccups along the way for granted, I have learned to appreciate and take in each moment as it comes.
No comments:
Post a Comment