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Opinion: Life's meaning summed up with love

As you get older, you get more used to death. You become familiar with seeing your elders pass on.

Death can be painful, especially, for the ones left behind. It’s a tragedy when a loved one’s life is cut short; and for parents, the loss of a child must be the worst. Thankfully, I haven’t gone through that, so I can only imagine how incredibly heart-wrenching it is.

I’ve lost people who meant the world to me — friends, mentors and family members. I lost my parents, Charles and Lois McDonald, several years ago and still miss them, but I don’t agonize over it. Theirs were, as my father would have said, “good” deaths.

They knew in advance they were dying. They endured a minimum of pain and discomfort in their final days. And they were as ready as anyone can be to move on.

Both of my parents, when in their 80s, could have fought for a longer life through another round of surgery, but they chose not to — not because they didn’t want to live, but because they knew that if they survived the surgeries, their quality of life would be impaired. They knew it was their time to go, and they accepted it.

They believed in God and life beyond this life, but that’s not really why they didn’t fear death. They counted their blessings to the end, held their family and friends close to their hearts, and embraced death as a natural conclusion to their wonderful lives here on earth.

My heart was both emptied and filled by their passing. I miss them, but will always be thankful for what they passed on to me and mine.

As a family, Thanksgiving is our more important holiday because of an annual reunion my parents helped create and sustain through the years. Every year for the past 25-plus years, my big and boisterous family gets together at a mountaintop lodge in the Ozark Mountains, where we celebrate our lives and loves together.

I still remember my parents sitting in the commons area at the lodge, with my mom smiling softly and my dad laughing out loud as the little ones scampered about playing with their cousins, aunts and uncles, siblings and extended family friends. You could tell in my parents’ eyes how special it was to see their big brood together in one place.

My cousin Phyllis once told us about how her parents, Betty and Tom Welch (who died a few years prior to my parents), loved to dance in their living room when their kids were young. On the night Tom died — a year or so after Betty’s passing — Phyllis said she awoke shortly after 2 a.m. and blurted out to her husband that her parents were “jitterbugging in heaven!” Before she went back to sleep, she said, she looked at her bedside clock — and later found out that it was precisely the time of death listed for her father’s passing.

I take solace in that story. I don’t know what happens after we die, but I do believe that, like our families here on earth, we are greater than the sum of our parts. And based on the influences of my family, especially my parents and my children, I’m convinced that the meaning of life is best summed up in one sacred word: Love.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

[email protected]

 
 
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