SAY IT NOW - MAKE LIFE BETTER

Regardless of when it happens, each of us will someday feel, we lost someone when they died. As the saying goes, Life: no one gets out alive.

When I experienced the first death in my life, of my elderly grandfather, I was just happy that I had, even at 15, the nerve to chance slipping into his hospital room and had been able to see him one more time before he died.

Nevertheless, his death and the loss it caused in my life, was the worst sadness and misery I had ever felt up until that time.

I was blessed, however, not long after, at this early age to find a book that helped me then and helps me now by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, called On Death and Dying. She was a pioneer in talking about the stages she saw both her terminally ill patients and their loved ones experience.

The stages are: Denial and Isolation,Anger,Bargaining,Depression (which I remember as Resignation) and Acceptance. Although, everyone did not experience all of these stages, most of them were normally experienced by the patient or their loved ones and in Bereavement.

What she had to say was very helpful to me, but something else she said changed the way I live forever.

In the course of the book, she mentioned that she attended a eulogy for someone. Various friends and family spoke about the person who had died. Almost all of them, mentioned his beautiful hands and how he expressed himself with them. 

I knew exactly what Kubler-Ross meant because I had seen a wonderful Life magazine vignette of a half dozen photos where Sophia Loren used her hands to communicate a variety of emotions.

What Kubler-Ross thought however, was what a pity it was that no one ever thought to tell this man the joy and pleasure he had brought to so many with his expressive gestures.

I determined at that young age, to NEVER neglect to tell someone that something about them was lovely. 

While, I have to admit, sometimes I forget, I even go up to strangers when I admire something and tell them.

One day last year, it was an Oriental girl who looked like Kate Middleton from the side and had the same smile; another time recently, it was someone wearing the perfect shade of lipstick. Any day at all when I see a little girl in her "Princess Dress", I speak with her and her parents.

I was delighted just last Friday, in Tim Horton's at Davisville and Yonge, in the late afternoon, by a woman who came up to me and said my hair colour was wonderful and I looked 'with it' and modern and up to date. It made my day. Obviously this lady was someone with taste and discernment...so, we had a nice chat. No wonder I still believe the best things in life are free.


NOTE: SEE ALSO - GOOD GRIEF - THE CONSOLATION OF MOURNING and 
                          A FINAL GOODBYE TO MY BEST FRIEND