I’d like to share a story about
myself and a friend I once had called Marie O’Conner. I spent a number of years
living overseas in New Zealand and in September 2009 I returned to Scotland,
where I first met Marie in a Frankie and Benny’s restaurant in Dunfermline, in
Fife.
When I first met her, I didn’t
know that she had an illness that was killing her, so in this restaurant she
was strangely quiet, even for a first date. I can talk, but even after five
minutes I began to notice that she hadn’t even got her breath back from walking
in the door.
When I eventually stopped talking
and finally got round to asking Marie a bit about herself and her life, she
began to tell me all about the journey she’d been on in her life with cystic
fibrosis. As I found out, this had been some journey for her, and each journey
has a starting and ending point, including the journey of life.
The minute we’re born, we start
this journey called life. Like any other journey, it’s eventually going to come
to an end, so the end of whatever journey we’re on is actually the one thing
that we all share in common.
For some of us, life can end
suddenly and unexpectedly or even after years of declining ill health, but it’s
going to come and like our birth, we don’t have any choice about when it
happens. We can completely ignore this fact, but it’s not going to change its
inevitability. A poet once wrote these words:
“Life comes
equally to us all as does death, and when it does come, it all makes us
completely equal too.”
This may seem like doom and gloom
but it’s not my intention to depress you and drag you down. The journey of life
also has a middle section and this is where the adventure begins, the years
between where we start and where we end. For some of this, the time can be
brief, but for most of us, this journey can last for many years from childhood
right through to adulthood.
Returning to Marie, I met her on
an online dating website as I’d returned to Scotland barely knowing a soul. I
met her in this Frankie and Benny’s restaurant after exchanging text messages
for a couple of weeks, so I’d grown to learn she had this illness, although I
still wasn’t quite sure what it was. I learned quickly that it’s an inherited
lifelong condition that mainly affects the lungs and pancreas.
Marie’s symptoms caused a
persistent cough and wheezing, constant chest infections and general ill health.
She shared with me how three years earlier she’d had a lung transplant which
had initially been a success, but she explained to me that a year or so after
her operation she began experiencing difficulties with her new lungs until one
day her body rejected them. Other than pain-relieving medication there was
nothing the specialists could do for my friend, and I began to realise that
Marie’s life expectancy was very limited.
Until now, I’d never met anyone
who seemed to value life more so than Marie. The medical professionals would
tell her to take it easy, but what Marie really, really wanted to do was to
live. She didn’t want to be stuck at home waiting to die as that wasn’t who she
was, so a week before Christmas 2009, having learned of Marie’s passion for all
things theatrical, I took her in her wheelchair to the local pantomime. I was
bored senseless, but Marie absolutely loved it. She sat there with the biggest,
cheesiest grin on her face and a tear rolled down her cheek as she shared with
me that she had doubted she’d ever get to see a musical again. This was the
beginning of our adventure together, this journey, if you like.
To begin with, as we started
spending more time together, Marie struggled to walk long distances, so any
time we went out she would be in her wheelchair, perhaps going round the local
shopping centre or going to the cinema. She hated the wheelchair, but it was
the only way she was going to manage to get out. Despite really wanting to
walk, her body fought against her. In her younger years she’d won medals and
awards for dancing and she’d reflect upon how she was back there and compare
herself to her current abilities, which was the major root of her frustrations
and grievances.
One day in early spring 2010 I
took Marie to Pittencrief Park in Dunfermline and I suggested that she get up
and walk. I was immediately faced with the doubts and fears that Marie was
struggling with, but she wanted to get up and do this, so eventually after
about ten to 15 minutes of procrastination and complaints, she got up, she
stood still for a few moments, she gained her focus and she went for it.
So from this short journey, other
journeys began. Some days we went for a walk in the local shopping centre, and
although we never actually bought anything, we’d go from shop to shop, Marie walking
in, clinging onto clothes rails for dear life while she got her breath back,
and when she was ready to move on again, we’d go to the next shop. Each outing
would end with a trip to the Pancake Place and Starbucks before I’d take her
home, physically exhausted. Through these trips we began to build up a bit of a
momentum, which led to trips to the cinema without her wheelchair. We began
attending church healing meetings around the country; such was Marie’s
desperation to try anything to make her better.
Autumn brought about a series of
chest infections that landed Marie in hospital for a few weeks, and she saw
this as a huge setback, knocking the confidence achieved from all the progress
we’d already made. She became involved in a local crafts group after coming out
of hospital, but this never matched the progress we’d made previously.
One afternoon when Marie’s
breathing was relatively stable I put my physical trainer’s hat back on and
suggested that we go for a drive. We drove down to the promenade in Kirkcaldy,
a place where she’d spent time as a child, and I suggested we get out of the
car and go for a short walk. She started out with a few whinges, moans and
complaints, but as we walked and talked, I suggested and provoked her to keep
on going, and she followed my orders. She wasn’t happy about this. Each bollard
we walked past brought about a whole new series of complaints and moans until
eventually we made it back to the car. Despite the doctors and nurses saying
this would never be possible, a girl with cystic fibrosis had walked a mile and
a half.
Marie wasn’t just angry with me
for making her do this unimaginable task, she was literally completely out of
breath in exactly the same way as if she’d only walked ten metres. Over the
next hour or so once she’d calmed down, she began to see the extent of what
she’d experienced. I didn’t hold her hand, I didn’t push her, I didn’t carry
her. We didn’t take the wheelchair as a back-up and she’d done this entirely on
her own. A month earlier she could barely walk, and if I’d shared my plans with
her, she wouldn’t have come with me, so she achieved this completely impossible
and imaginable task entirely on her own.
Over the next few months, my
perspective had changed. We started to see each other less as I started a new
job in car sales, allowing the job to completely consume my life. I went on a
journey to make money, which I believed to be highly important to me at the
time.
I was working in Perth one
morning in mid-December 2010 when I received a phone call from Marie’s dad. He
asked me if I could make it round to the house urgently. On checking my phone,
I realised I had 23 missed calls and one text message from Marie that read,
“Kain, please come, I want to live”. My heart sank.
I got in the car and broke the
speed limit getting from Perth to Kirkcaldy. I knew in my heart that something
wasn’t right and could barely see through my tears. As I arrived at Marie’s house,
her mum, her dad and her sister were there and the doctor and pastor were
leaving. Marie had taken a steep downward spiral and I realised that my friend
was dying. For the next seven to eight hours I sat with Maureen, Marie’s mum,
her sister, Mandy and her dad, Mark, as Marie drifted in and out of
consciousness, refusing point blank to take any painkillers because she didn’t
want to be sedated. This went on until about eight o’clock at night when Marie
took her last breath, speaking out her last words. She looked me, her mum, her
dad and her sister in the eye and said, “God is good”. This reduced us all to
tears.
Marie’s life ended in my arms and
in the midst and company of those she knew, loved and cared about the most, and
I was completely crushed. I had spent the last few months of my friend’s life
selfishly sacrificing our friendship for selling cars and making money. Until
Marie’s dying moments, she seemed to completely appreciate and love me
unconditionally just as she had done since we first met, despite my selfish
change of focus and my changed priorities towards her.
Returning to the journey that
we’re all on, despite some of not seeing it as a journey, it can be very easy
sometimes to lose perspective of what it is that’s actually really important in
life. We can get caught up in the most insignificant garbage, and I don’t think
I stand alone in sometimes becoming so consumed with my own immediate problems
and worries that I lose perspective of what’s important. For some people,
life’s a constant series of struggles to survive, whereas other people have all
that they could ever want, but are still completely unsatisfied, empty and
unfulfilled. Why is this often the case?
When Marie died in my arms on 21
December 2010, I can honestly say my perspective of life changed. The things
that had seemed so important in the past weren’t important any longer, and
possibly for the first time I actually valued the life I had on a par with
lives of others.
I chose that day to commit the
rest of my life to being the best me that I can be for others, for anyone
that needs me to be better for them. I’ve grown to believe that most people in
life never stop for long enough to reflect upon the journey that they’re on,
where they’ve been, where they’re going or what it is that they really want to
go and achieve, and why they want to go and achieve these things. For some,
life’s journey can be stained with heartache, neglect and hurt, where we can
always hope for something different and greater and for some people lasting
peace and joy never quite manages to find its way around.
If you’ve found yourself crushed
by problems beyond your control, sickness, recession or broken relationships,
sometimes life can seem nothing more than a hopeless burden with no positive
end in sight. What is the purpose of living, anyway? I believe that no matter
where you’re at, who you are or what road you’ve been travelling on in life so
far, absolutely everything can be different, and you’re only going to get one
shot at this journey so why not make the most of it?
So I guess we could end this
article with a principle that may offer some people a deeper perspective for
living: Find someone who is less fortunate than you, who’s got more stuff going
on than you and just be a friend.
No one needs to be a professional
life coach or NLP practitioner to be able to effectively help other people out
in life. I made a mistake, I spent the last few months of my friend Marie’s
life pursuing money, and when she died, I was crushed. But what crushed me more
was the guilt and shame of pursuing something that bore so much of a lesser
value than my dear friend’s life.
Life after all is a gift, and a
gift’s a present, something that’s meant to be enjoyed, right here, right now.
Kain
http://www.kainramsay.com
No comments:
Post a Comment