Guest Blog: deep love

Sunday. I have taken the garbage and recyclables to the road for the Monday pickup, lots from a weekend full of visitors here for William‘s walk for curing Mitochondrial disease at Freedom Park followed by submarine sandwich picnic. Named submarines I guess because that is what the sandwiches look like, one long baguette filled with meats, cheese and tapanade and olive oil. We also had the peanut butter and jelly submarine.

Sometimes I feel a kind of deep sadness

And today I have it

Not always provoked

But yet and still

There is the deep love I have for my grandchildren I have been with for the last two days

William, 4, of course jerking looking around smiling laughing pausing listening eternally floppy and our surprise child never knowing how much we take healthy strong children for granted and never knowing how we can deal with this again and again.

When we first heard of mitochondrial disease we looked on the internet and the first sentence was “a form of dementia”…

I don’t look on the internet anymore.

Deep love

Deep love for Davis, 10, and his freckles and his enthusiasm and eagerness for everything, the escalators at the museum, pushing William at the walk, roasting huge marshmallows, writing with a charcoal stick on the rock, making a comic strip about reincarnation,

Saying “being at the museum, that this is heaven”…

I tell the curator.

Deep love for Alexander, 7, making it through the night, making his fort and having his book to read himself to sleep, sitting up and talking to himself that he can spend the night here and not be homesick, loving the outdoor shower long and hot in the cool of an October night, smiling with chocolate Oreo cookie in his teeth, crazy all of them for the hammock.

Deep love for Phillip, 10, being the oldest and telling us several times that he is and therefore he is the boss and Phillip finding each person little gifts under $15 at the museum shop including “Jewel” for William and can still at ten can unabashedly at the park crawl into his mother’s lap

And then deep love for Julia, 8, curling up with her mom, telling me how much she loves her biddy babies American girl doll that I gave her for her 8^th birthday just last week and thoroughly entertaining to Alexander at the museum planting and replanting artist Romrare Bearden’s garden in the art room the place where you can touch the art, you can be loud, you can draw, and build towers and laugh.

Deep love, being alive, emptying garbage and recyclables and glad that I can do that.

***

This is a guest post by Nancy Dorrier. Nancy and her team at Dorrier Underwood are doing amazing work helping to transform organizations and individuals throughout the USA. I think much of their success comes from the fact that they “walk the talk“. You should call Nancy and find out more about the work that they do. I had the pleasure of questing alongside Nancy as a part of a team in the recent WEST program. Nancy helped me to see my world and my future in new ways and it seemed only right that I should support her desire to write more by sharing some of her wisdom with you here in my blog. Image used with permission: www.paulfetters.com

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