Hey, Amy here.
I have a favorite saying that I believe and it came to be my mantra when my dad was dying. It's:
Life is fragile, love is the glue.
It's still one of my mantras...
and I remind myself of the importance of love every day, as I go through different challenges in my life and watch people I love go through challenges.
When things feel really hard, I remind myself how fragile life is... and that it could always be worse... and that tomorrow isn't promised and that we really do just have to make the most of every single day
that we get to be here on earth.
None of our time should be taken for granted.
I had a huge reminder of this on Monday, when I found out a friend's cancer had taken a turn for the worst and that she was at the very
end of her life now.
I made some food to bring over for her family while they were sitting bedside, and it all felt so surreal.
It brought back memories of other loved ones that have passed in my life, often mysteriously
or without much warning.
Life really is fragile. And sometimes it makes loving people fully kind of scary.
I remember when I first got married - I was having so much fear about something happening to my husband - or him
leaving me for someone else... so much that I felt like I couldn't love fully.
It was likely my abandonment issues coming up from having lost my mom in a car accident when I was 18... I felt like I wanted to run away so that I could avoid ever having to be hurt like that again.
So I called my uncle- the one I just went to spend Thanksgiving with in New England.
He's my mom's only sibling and I watched him when he lost his mother, my grandmother- and he had already lost his father at a young age. And then he lost my mom, his sister,
in a car accident which was, and is still, SO hard for him.
He was the one that actually had to go identify my mom's body after the accident because my dad just couldn't do it. And I couldn't even imagine what that must have been like for him.
So when I was feeling like running away I called him because
after all of the loss and trauma he had experienced, I watched him love fully... every one in his life... his patients (he's a doctor), his family, his friends, everyone.
His love was bigger than anything I had ever seen.
So I called him to ask him how he does that after all of the loss he has experienced.
I asked him if he was afraid to lose someone else, and how he was able to love people fully without feeling like he needed to protect his heart.
And his answer was that life is meaningless if we do not allow ourselves to love people all the way... to embrace love and to love fully.
We had an amazing conversation about it. And that conversation helped me so much and it has stayed with me all of these years.
And now I'm watching him pour all of his love into my aunt who has Parkinson's. I'm watching him read poetry to her and to do silly things to make her laugh and, even though she can't talk much anymore, I watch him give all of his heart in his effort to communicate with her.
He just loves fully and cherishes every single minute
with her.
He loves the Rolling Stones and when I was there for Thanksgiving I played one of his favorite Rolling Stones songs on the guitar and we sang it together for my aunt. Then I asked him what his favorite song to dance to was and he said 'Start Me Up' and 'Honkey Tonk Woman' so I put those on and we danced and he was being silly and making her
laugh- it was the sweetest thing I've ever seen.
That's what loving fully looks like.
Now when I am reminded like I was again this week about how fragile life is, my fear just disappears
completely.
Any fear that I might have about my work or my mission or about putting myself out there or about being vulnerable- it all goes away when I remember what a little blip in time my life actually is.
It makes me want to live full out, unapologetically, for every second of it.
And do what I know I came here to do. And not question anything. And live fully. And love fully. And experience all of it fully.
We owe it to ourselves to live that way, and we owe it to the world. We are literally doing the world a huge disservice if we don't.
