So far, I haven’t signed up for an ALS support group or tried to persuade anyone in my family to go to one, but my friend Laura has been spending time with her father who is about my age and has terminal leukemia. It helps to hear from her about getting along with her father (“BFD”):
🙂 i woke up to pee at 3 am and caught sight of the easy chair that my dad sits in and saw he was in it instead of in bed and he had insomnia so i sat in the dark with him in the living room for a couple of hours. He was very philosophical. I just love him so much. It’s killing me.
One thing I’ll say is that bfd has a really short fuse. It’s hard to pretend it doesn’t bother me, but I’m trying not to “start” anything, if you know what I mean. But it’s not my favorite. 😦
I don’t think that I have such a short fuse, but I can’t imagine Laura‘s words from any member of my family either. There was a time when we all told one another nearly every day, “I love you.” Love is an underestimated, neglected (and abused) mode of treatment, possibly the cheapest and in some ways the most effective of all. Maybe we’re afraid to make use of it because it’s jammed into some sort of explosive triggering conundrum along with feelings of guilt and dangers of self-recognition. Who knows! I would have to look too closely at myself to answer that.
Signed,
Andrew (Weeks)
Normal Thoughts 