Give me one good reason why I should never make a change
Above: a house in Budapest.
My 21-year-old daughter, Patience, is about ready to fly the coop. For the past two years she’s been working toward moving to Prague to live for one or possibly two years to teach English as a second language (ESL), and now she’s got (almost) enough money saved, she’s enrolled in the certification program over there and the one-way airplane ticket has been purchased.
And in perhaps the most extreme case of helicopter-parenting you’ll read about today (but probably not this week), my wife and I are going with her for the first two months, with our own little side-trip to Budapest on the way (the kid’s going to have to meet us in Prague, so tough noogies). Under normal circumstances this would be a pretty big change. I’m not sure what we’d even call normal anymore, but now it’s a big boulder-in-your-throat kind of change. This is something Patience has been wanting to do for some time as she accumulated college credits at a breakneck pace to graduate at age 20, and since well before I was diagnosed a year ago.
In part you can blame her mother who once told her to do something big while she was young and unattached rather than waiting until she was older. (And the kid listened; go figure). I’m not so sure I was ever 100% on-board with the idea since I know I’ll really miss having her around, but I mostly kept my own counsel and hoped that Patience would get distracted and pursue something else. It was a vain hope, of course, because I’m in a position to know better than anybody that there’s never been much capable of distracting this girl when she has her mind set on something. Even when she was little she was the one making plans and carrying them out. Dedicate her nine-year-old entrepreneurial self to earning the funds to buy an American Heritage doll? No problem. Write 50,000 words in one month for NaNoWriMo at age 13? She could do it in her sleep (in fact, I think some of it may have been written in her sleep). Win the first short-story writing, novel-writing and play-writing contests you enter? Check, check and check.
So - oh, me. Oh, my.
To tell you the truth, this situation was one of the first things I thought of after the initial shock of the diagnosis last April. To say I was conflicted is an understatement, especially in context of the doctor saying average life expectancy is three years. I had a rising hope that, given that kind of window, she might decide not to go; I felt bitter regret that she might not want to go, and that my health would be the cause of it. As much as I want to greedily hoard every moment, greed carries its own seeds of bitterness within.
Furthermore, if you’ve been following this blog, you know we have a different take on “life expectancy” than the doctors. That is, we are much more “expectant” of God’s grace and power in our lives, and we’ve seen that borne out this last year as the disease has been slowed nearly to a standstill and I’ve been able to return to work and do all kinds of “normal” things that are nonetheless bathed in the awareness of just how special they really are. You may also recall that I’ve talked about bucket lists here. While travel is something people often want to do when diagnosed with a terminal illness, it really hasn’t been that high on my list. I’ve traveled a lot in my life, and loved it, but my focus is on what I can put into other people’s buckets, rather than what I can cram into my own. This new opportunity is actually a chance to travel AND pour some memories and adventures into someone else’s life; to help set the stage and open doors for the exciting future we believe is in store for her.
Isn’t that what any parent really wants? We know that at some point - near or far - there have to be things that live on after us, no matter how tempting it is to keep things the same. Bittersweet is the word that was invented to describe the process of resisting and embracing change at the same time. So, give me one good reason why I should never make a change, to be willing to accept all that will come in both faith and hope (which is expectation), in order to open the door to go out, rather than hold it closed against what may try to come in. To paraphrase George Ezra: “My fear, my loneliness; my blasted selfishness…
“But for you, you, I’d leave it all.”
Below: Prague
- April 28, 2015
A Christian thinker stands up to ALS.“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."