The flip side of the coin

My friend Lexi (you know, the one who is wise and amazing and has a boy with autism and a little girl with Down syndrome, and who I'd say is my soul sister if that weren't so totally cheesy?) had this great blog post about perspective, and now it's gone, so I can't link to it so you can read for yourself just how great it was. But it was really, really good, take my word for it, and I've been thinking about it a lot over the past couple days. It's been in the back of my head as I've been throwing myself this extravagant pity party. She wrote it after her little girl came home from the hospital for the 2nd time because of pneumonia, and after the earthquake and tsunami that ravaged Japan, and after finding out her friend's little girl has a mass in her stomach that may or may not be cancerous. And it was so, so impressive that she could see past her pain and stress and worry and see those people around her who were suffering.

I just got home from a funeral. It was my friend's little boy who passed away. He was almost 6 months old, and he died in his sleep, in the middle of the day, after she put him down for a nap. He had fought valiantly through 2 months in the NICU after being born 10 weeks early at 2 lbs. 12 oz., and had been home almost 4 months. As a mom, I can't think of anything more devastating than having to bury one of my children. When the 4 pallbearers walked into the chapel carrying that little miniature coffin, it was so heart-rending--it literally took my breath away for a few seconds and made me weak in the knees and my body tremble. And the poor mommy looked like she hadn't stopped grieving and crying since Monday, when he passed away. (And I wanted so desperately to take all that aching pain away.) We came home after the funeral, and of course, the family went on to the cemetery to lay his little body in the grave. I can only imagine the heartbreak of this poor mommy as her little boy's body, which she'd held and kissed and rocked and loved for such a short time--and yet so fiercely because he was almost taken from her right after his birth and she wasn't going to let him go that easily--is separated from her for the rest of this life. I'm sure that for now at least, even the knowledge that she'll get to hold him again is minimal comfort when her arms ache for his warm little body to snuggle right now, and tomorrow, and next week.

Last week, one of my good friends rushed from her home in Idaho to central Oregon to be with her family as her brother died in a hospice room. He was about 30 years old, and left behind 3 little kids and a sweet wife. He'd had melanoma a few years ago, which had gone into remission, only to resurface as a tumor somewhere else, and that cancer spread so horribly rapidly and took over his whole body in just a few months. His suffering was terrible, and he's now thankfully been released from all his pain, but still--his wife is now a widow, and his little kids have no daddy.

Why do I share these 2 terribly gut-wrenching stories? Because I know that what I'm dealing with and fretting over with this baby I'm carrying really is so very, very small in comparison to so many tougher things in life, and I've lost perspective. It's like crying over a hangnail when the person next to you has no arm. Or something (this makes sense in my head). And the hangnail hurts and you don't have nail clippers to cut it off, and you obsess about it and it snags on your clothes and other things, and it's always right there, driving you crazy no matter what else you happen to be doing. But, still, it's only just a hangnail, and that person next to you has no arm. And you look at them and realize that even with your painful hangnail, you can do lots of things like play with your kids and fold laundry and make the bed. It might be annoying, but you have both your hands to do the things you need and want to do. And that poor person next to you with no arm is, well, basically just much worse off than you are. So you're maybe crying about the stupid hangnail bugging you (haven't you ever cried about a hangnail? Let's pretend you have), and through your tears you look over and glimpse that person missing an arm and realize how foolish your tears are over something so insignificant. And you remember your blessings and feel so grateful.... But, still, maybe when you haven't seen that armless person in a while, you forget and start feeling sorry for yourself again about your dang hangnail.... But hopefully you're smarter than that and remember that your life is so good and you have a great family and wonderful friends and access to wonderful truths contained in scriptures, and a personal relationship with a God who really does love you and won't leave you alone, ever, (and this is where the hangnail analogy falls flat on its face because it's so shallow), and because of all these wonderful parts of your life, you can have the strength to make it through whatever comes your way. Not to mention that you really don't have to look very far to see someone whose life sucks a WHOLE lot worse than yours does. That's all a part of perspective, and I'm so glad Lexi reminded me of it.