New Year 2008: Dry Erase Boards and Hanging on to Hope

It was a good day. Different, but good.
My mother lost her hearing in one ear about ten years ago, and a week ago she suddenly lost the hearing in her other ear. We thought it was temporary because she has had a touch of some upper respiratory thing. We found out Monday night that it is not temporary. The doctors will try steriods, but the most likely scenario is a four-hour surgery to insert a Cochlear implant. It restores hearing, but my mother has myriad of health issues which I would list here, but it would be a long and rather unbelievable list. Her heart doctor will have to OK the surgery. We're praying that he will because right now, she is mostly deaf. Which brings me to New Year's Day. I woke up feeling a little down, wishing we were going to have our usual, normal, New Year's Day lunch. Just fun. All good. Happy times. I wasn't sure how we were all going to be jovial now knowing that along with all the other health issues, Mom's hearing is more than just temporary, and will require another surgery (just how many surgeries CAN one body endure?)

Kyle went out this morning before everyone came over and bought two dry erase boards and announced that we were going to have a good day - that we were going to enjoy every moment of it, because, as he reminded me, life is short. No need to grouse around when there is life to be lived. So, we armed ourselves with writing boards and scribbled notes to Mom all day. Some of them were about plans for the new house, some of them were poems, some were a simple "I love you," and Alison wrote such wonderful notes as "I love flewers" (flowers), and "I want to be a vet." We sent one dry erase board home with Dad, but honestly I think he prefers the challege of charades and getting her to read lips. She's pretty good at it and I think he's proud.

Kyle is right. Life is short, and there is too much of it to be lived to mope. But I think Kyle didn't come up with this all on his own. I think he's been watching my parents. I am 42 years old and I almost came to the point of thinking that I had nothing left to learn from them, but I was wrong. We are watching them, and we are learning what it means to keep faith and hold on to hope. We are learning how God sustains us when we think we can't walk any further. And we are learning what it means to love someone through it all - "in sickness and in health."

So we had a good day with our dry erase boards and black-eyed peas and talk of plans for the New Year. As I look at my new, clean calendar for 2008, I don't know what the days will look like, but I know that each one of them is a precious gift.

Happy New Year.