Aftermath and follow-up

[aadler]

So, in my last non-fic posting for 2021, I mentioned the heart attack.

Though there have been after-effects, it didn’t really seem to have done much as far as altering my basic outlook. At least, that was how it seemed to me, and I even told my kids — when they inquired by Skype — that once it was over with, it had made so little difference that it might as well have not happened.

I wasn’t making that up. That actually was how it seemed to me. At the time.

The last couple of weeks, though, I’ve kept remembering. When I was in the emergency room, while they were still trying to come up with a diagnosis (because my symptoms were so atypical that they couldn’t quite decide till they had cardiac enzymes as an indicator) … I didn’t think I was dying, but I knew I might be; and, knowing that, I found that the two things that mattered most to me were 1) how happy I was that I’d spent all those years with my wife, and 2) that I really wanted to make sure she knew that. (So I told her, even before I was transferred to the hospital where the stents were installed the next day.)

I keep being reminded of what I saw as most important when I was in what might have been the last minutes of my life (though, I stress again, I really didn’t believe it, I just knew it was possible). And I’ve come to think it changes the way I see the life I’m living now.

What I keep remembering is how grateful I was. I genuinely felt I’d been blessed to have the life I’d been given, even if that life was about to wind out.

And, in acknowledgment of that, with the new year I’ve begun saying a Rosary every day — with my wife — and once again the reason behind it is gratitude. I get to keep living for however much longer I do, and I get to know, consciously now, just how much that means to me.

I’m not putting up a front, this really is how I feel. I’m such a lucky man, and didn’t truly recognize it before now.

Comments

[texanfan.livejournal.com]

I do hope that I can have such an exemplary attitude when I face my mortality. Gratitude is definitely something I should be practicing much more frequently.

[aadler]

I fully agree with you … but, for me, the surprise was that I didn’t have to work on it, it was there waiting for me. A gift, rather than any virtue of mine.