One of my favorite pictures of me with Jack and Wanda
So many things are coming together I wanted to blog about it to share and to understand all my thought and feelings.
For work we are reading The 5 Languages of Appreciations in the Workplace. I have read and enjoyed the 5 Love languages. My strongest love language is quality time. I took the quiz again this morning and confirmed that I feel loved when I have a persons full and undivided attention.
I feel so incredibly blessed that I got to spend quality time with my uncle Jack last Friday. I got a call from my sister yesterday morning saying he had died while taking a nap on Thursday. Oh sweet Jack.
Jack is my dad's older brother and is my uncle but more like a grandfather to me. My grandfather died before I was born and my grandma when I was 13 years old. As children we grew up going to visit my grandma in Utah and then we continued visiting Jack and Wanda. When I left home I would always visit Jack and Wanda when I went to Utah. Wanda died in 2013.
Last week I had a sudden urge to go to Utah. I flew to Utah on Friday and Jill and her two boys and I went to visit Jack.
I got to give him a hug, be his support as we walked the dirt path beck to his house from feeding his chickens, eat lunch with him (we brought lunch with us from Kneaders), sit in his backyard and talk. He told us how he remembers when he was 14 years old he came home from hunting owl and his father told him that they were at war. The date was December 7, 1941 and he was 14 years old.
I feel so blessed that I got to spend this quality time with him just days before he died. This has happened with my mom and dad too. In the past three years I have got to spend quality time with three people I love very much at the end of their life and it brings so much comfort to me.
If you have been following my blog for awhile you will remember my post about my mom's death called Share My World: Sweet Sacred Experience. In a similar way I felt I needed to go to see my mom. I had been planning on going to take care of her at the end of her life, she was on hospice. Since I live and work in Arizona and she lived in Oregon it was a matter I wondered about "when do I go home?". After she fell and couldn't get up without help I decided it was time. I felt so far away and bought tickets for the next day. I spent a wonderful, hard, emotion filled, loving week with her before she died. That was 6 months ago (January 30, 2019) and while there have been a lot of emotions as I grieve for my mom I have a lot of comfort knowing I shared the last part of her life with her and gave her the best love and care I could. It also brings me peace that we shared a lifetime of love and friendship and so much quality time. Our favorite way to spend quality time together was playing games. "Our" game together was Canasta! I love and miss her.
As I think about Jack dying I think of his brother and my dad who died about three years ago (September 30, 2019). In the same way that I felt I should go to Utah this past week I also felt that I should go to Oregon. My nephew was getting baptized and my dad had told me about a month before that he was sick, that he had seen blood in his urine and was getting some tests done. At that time I thought we still had a long time together, including Christmas with him. I decided that I would go to Oregon and be there for my nephew and see my dad too while he was still feeling ok. On a layover in San Francisco I called my mom and she told me that my dad was put on hospice that day. By the time we got to my dad he could walk and took us to his shop but couldn't talk very well. I was able to spend the last week of his life taking care of him too. The time, although very difficult and hard to navigate, was also full of lots of love and time taking care of my sweet dad.
In recognizing that my love language is quality time I can see and feel God's love for me in providing opportunities for me to have quality time with my uncle Jack, my dad and mom.
Time now for some meditation and yoga.