~to have had a very good life~

In her early 80's, a few years before entering long-term nursing home care, my mom made all of her funeral plans.  A very nice lady from the local funeral home came to her house and brought all of the information and paperwork to sign that she would need.  Everything was done.  Not one thing was left to take care of when she passed away at the age of 87 just two weeks after her birthday that year.  Mom left a spiral notebook that detailed all of the plans she had made for us kids in the event of her death and kept it in a special place where we could find it when she was gone.  She loved us very much.  I know that she didn't want us to worry about anything so on the very last page of it, in her typical "Lois Scott" scrawl, she left us a 7 word message.

"I have had a very good life!"

And looking back it, she was right.  
She did.

How quickly time goes in this thing called our "life".  I am thinking at the present time that 59 years sure flew by me.  One day you are a kid having the time of your life dragging Main Street in Hutch with your high school friends and the next day you are getting ready to begin your 38th year as a teacher.  In between all of those years a lot of things happen.  Some of it is good and some not so good but it is what it is.

Life.

I have tried to chronicle my own life for over the past 4 years now in this online blog.  It started out simple with the intention of only going a few weeks or so but then it became something totally different and this morning's post will be number 914.  I wanted to do it mostly for my children so in the years following my own passing, they could read it and remember what their mom was like.  Yet as I continued to write it, a different reason for creating it appeared.  I found that writing out my thoughts and feelings was very therapeutic to me and helped me to fight an occasional bout or two with depression.  Sometimes I write every day and other times only a few times a week.  I don't know when I will stop or even if I ever will stop.  I never dreamt I that I would write 100 blog entries let alone nearly 1,000.  

Yet amazingly I have.

It's funny in a way.  Once I write something and publish it online, I nearly all of the time forget what it was that I wrote about.  Really, no kidding.  In only a matter of an hour or two.  I mentioned that to a dear friend once and told her it was kind of concerning to me.  How could I write something and then just totally forget what it was that I wrote about?  I loved the answer she gave to me.

"Oh Peggy don't even think of worrying about that!  It just means that you had something on your mind, you wrote about it and got it off your chest, and then went on with life."

You know, I like to think that she is right.

I'm not a professional writer and never will I profess to be but one thing I can make a claim to is this.  Just like my mother, on the last page of my own notebook of funeral plans, I too shall write the same words that she once did.

"I have had a very good life!"

And I will be right.
I have.

My mom was a writer too.  For 6 years, she kept a daily diary of what life was like for her.  The one above was her very first one.  Sometimes her messages were short and sweet while other times a bit longer.  How wonderful it is to pick up this journal and to read my mother's words once again.  

Life.

The first 6 of us kids.  I'm that little baby on my mom's lap.
Our little sister Cindy was just "the twinkle in daddy's eyes" then.