Gift

... giveth ... and ... taketh away

In 1960, for a LTJG, being Duty Officer at the Naval Station, Mayport was sheer boredom. The DO served with a Command Duty Officer, though, and one night LCDR Gus Bello was CDO and took me for my first helicopter ride. South over the coastal towns. Atlantic Beach, Neptune Beach where Linda and I lived 1959 to 1962 when Malinda was little and when Joe was born. Jacksonville Beach, Ponte Vedra. Gus was a smiling extrovert, a career Naval officer and pilot. Some months after that, he and his family were rotated. Later the Navy sent us to the University of Michigan, then to Japan. 

We saw Gus one more time, about 1965, at the NEX at Naval Air Station, Atsugi. He greeted us warmly, then said, “We lost our son two weeks ago.” Fourteen, he’d died of a brain aneurysm. They had known of the aneurysm for years, but nothing could be done, and they had lived with hope. Gus said, “We took him home to bury him. I can hardly stand being here now, I want to move. But that would be running away, and that’s wrong.” Being with Gus that day is my first memory of such a loss.

Life Is Good, mostly. Love, laughs, sports, books, art, friends and neighbors, religion, school, childhood, youth and aging. There is Adventure and boredom, challenge, victory, sunshine and cloudy days, surprise and disappointment. Tears; of joy, relief, sadness, greeting, parting; dying, death. Blizzards and summer rainstorms. Feasts, good food, rich smells. Diets. Music. Fall colors and spring flowers. Maple syrup. Chocolate. Shoveling snow and scraping windshields. Getting in a hot car in August. Lovingkindness.

Looking out over St. Andrews Bay while driving along Beach Drive always stirs my gratitude for life and my awareness that life is tentative. Some of us have life because someone else died years before: this was Alfred’s bay long before it was mine. 

Life is a gift. John Claypool, Episcopal priest, wrote Tracks of a Fellow Struggler: Living and Growing Through Grief in which he talks about his life during the illness, dying and death of his daughter. In the course of living through his grief, Father John came to the realization and experience that LauraLu had been a gift, not someone he earned, or to whom he was entitled, but a gift who graced his life for a while.  

Life is a gift, just a gift. Ashlea graduated from Clemson this summer and was to continue school in the fall. Sunday evening she had a stroke, the St. Thomas prayer chain was told yesterday morning, critical and bleeding. She was a late-in-life baby, the apple of her 70 year old father’s eye. The afternoon email reported to us that Ashlea’s physicians had just told her family that she is brain dead. 

Life Is Good anyway, isn’t it. Mostly. A gift. It’s better to have been given it, and loved it, and had it taken away than never to have had it at all. 

Ashlea, a daughter, and a sweetheart. A gift.

Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

TW+