I’M HAVING A HIGH SCHOOL MOMENT!

Wow - these last few days have really hit me hard!  Not only have I been really sick, but emotionally I have been experiencing a lot more depression than normal.  I'm wondering if it is because I'm so close to being finished, that I want all of this pain to end.  Now that I realize I am going to have to deal with these symptoms for another 3 weeks in order to get it out of my system, it's harder to be patient than I thought.

I've been thinking lately that we all know we are going to die sometime, but what if we knew that we only had 2 years to live. What would you do differently, or what would you start doing? I have faith that the chemo I am taking right now will kill the cancer I have right now. What I am not sure of, is what will come in its place, especially because I am positive for the BRCA gene 1 (which states that I have an 87% chance of getting breast cancer before I am 70 years old). So basically I have a terminal disease and I will probably die (sometime) from it. I don’t mean to be morbid or anything, I am just being realistic. So if this is the case, what should I be doing with my time?

I began making it a matter of prayer. There are many things I can’t do, but there are many things that I can. Several years ago when we were living in Prescott, I decided to take our old home videos and run them through my video editing machine called an “avio” and edit them and then burn them to DVD’s for each of our children. Craig then helped me type up a table of contents for all the DVD’s so the kids could reference certain events and years at a glance. It has been so well received by all our kids AND our grandchildren. It is so interesting to see how much they like watching “little Amy” or “A week with Grandma”. Since we don’t watch normal TV on Sundays, this is a great time for our kids and grandkids to watch these videos and remember the good times that we had.

What else can I leave for my posterity? I started keeping a journal when I was 18 years old. When I left for BYU, my mom gave me a white journal and challenged me to write my college experiences in it. I soon found that writing was so rewarding to me that I continued keeping a journal throughout the years. I didn’t write every day; just when I was moved to and when something interesting happened. I now have over 35 years of volumes of journals. What will happen to them? Will my kids ever read them? I don’t know, probably not. Amy is the only one that has expressed an interest in reading about when I was a young mother. So when I asked my daughters what they would like me to leave, they said that if I wrote my life history it might serve as an outline of all my journals and might cause them to want to read, “the rest of the story” in my journals.

So the last couple of weeks I have been going through some of my old journals, keepsakes and high school yearbooks. Several years ago I started a measly attempt of my life history and had put down my elementary school teachers and a few things I remembered. Now 30 years later I went back and read what I had written and I’m so happy that I wrote it then, because I have forgotten so much already. I was really impressed when I saw a list my mom and dad had put together of all of their church callings years ago. So that was what I started trying to do from memory. It was impossible. So thanks to my journals I have been able to go back and find out what callings I had and what year I had them. 

It was so interesting to notice the feelings I had as I flipped through my yearbooks. As I looked at all the cheerleaders and prom kings and queens, I thought how I wish I could see what their lives were like today. As I looked at the different pages, I realized that I was not on hardly any pages of the yearbook. I felt like such a loser! Then I read the things all the people wrote on the front and back of my yearbook. Most of them, I couldn’t even remember who they were.

That afternoon after I finished flipping through the yearbook, I realized that I was in a bad mood. Amy called and I told her that I couldn’t quite put a finger on why I was in a bad mood. Then when she found out that I had been having a trip down memory lane she said, “Oh no wonder mom, you are having a high school moment!" All those insecurities and frustrations I felt in High School that seemed so important then, were now resurfacing. It was at that moment that I realized how INSIGNIFICANT HIGH SCHOOL really was! I feel like I am a completely different person now and I feel like I have made a difference in my life and many others, so unlike what I felt in High School.

That night after having a miserable trip down memory lane, I began experiencing pain from another urinary tract infection. I had tried to go to sleep, but I was too uncomfortable. Craig came in and I asked him for a blessing. The night before had been a long and painful one and I didn’t want to experience another night like that. It was so interesting what he said in his blessing. He blessed me that I would be able to sleep well and make it through the pain. But the really interesting thing he said was that I needed to remember that the trials I was going through right now were helping to prepare a place for me in the life hereafter. The minute he said that, I had an epiphany come to my mind. Just like High School has turned out to be so unimportant to the rest of my life, all of a sudden I had this vision of Earth Life. I realized just how insignificant earth life will be in regards to our Eternal Life! I thought of how much importance we stress on the things we do or don’t do, buy or don’t buy while here on earth. And in perspective, it is just as insignificant as rearranging the chairs on the Titantic! What DOES matter in earth life is the way we treat people and handle our trials. Our trials then really become our pre-requisite courses that we have to take in earth life to prepare us for our Graduation into Eternal life. How we handle them is whether we graduate with honors or not. Wow that is profound. It sure helps me look at my trials with a different perspective!!