Many years ago, my wife and I lost a dear colleague to breast cancer. She battled the disease for several years and underwent a mastectomy and eventually the amputation of one arm before the cancer took her life. She was a caring person, and to put it in the terms of one of my mentors, “a straight shooter.” Her word was her bond. She tried to have a positive influence on everyone she met and was a true professional…until she was unable to work any longer. Many of us mourned her passing.
I didn’t know Donna as well as I should have, but for some reason her life made more of an impression on me than I knew. A few weeks after she died, I had a dream about her. She appeared to me dressed in radiant white, apparently whole. Her arm and the rest of her body had been restored. She looked like a younger woman. I didn’t say anything. She said two things I remembered clearly after I woke up. (1) “Don’t let those around you who lack commitment deter you from your own.” (2) “Life can be so difficult, but I’d gladly live it all again to be where I am now.”
These statements were certainly in character for Donna. In the dream, I wondered how she knew I was going through a rough patch, questioning my choices. Of course, she didn’t know what I was dealing with, but I did. Her appearance was a manifestation of my subconscious mind trying to make sense of what was going on in my life. Her death and my questions collided to offer wise, or at least pertinent thoughts. Nevertheless, her words have been inspiring. I have remembered them for decades. They are universally true, at least from the standpoint of someone who believes in commitment or the possibility of an afterlife.
Assuming we have made good decisions, we shouldn’t depend on others’ choices or behavior to stay the course with them. We can remain committed to integrity, fairness, kindness, generosity, personal growth, professional excellence, and the like with or without the commitment of others. There will always be those around us who “lack commitment.” We are ultimately responsible to choose our own values, solve our own problems, and seek our own happiness. It’s important to have help, and we should both ask for and accept it when need be, but we must not let others define us or become our excuses for not doing what we know we need to do.
Donna was convinced the next life would be better. I hope it will be, but I’m not 100% sure. If you’re reading this and believe our faith and endurance matter, that heaven exists for those who believe in the Son of God, her second declaration will ring true. Even if one doesn’t believe, it’s still valid. In a sense, our past is the price we pay to be admitted to our future. Our experiences – our choices, mistakes, and sufferings – make us who we are.
To deny our difficulties or that we must work through them is to assert that we are incapable of growth. Donna, as a construct of my mind, acknowledged that without trials there can be no arrival at a better place. No one gets there, wherever there might be, automatically. Whether the place is a literal heaven or a metaphorical heaven of better emotional or spiritual wellbeing, who wouldn’t want to wrestle with life’s difficulties all over again if they knew they would end up there?
MurrayWorks 