These Are My JOTtings...

Finishing Well

When we think about the lives of those dearest to us as well as heroes from afar, whom we have yet to meet, we instantly remember significant contributions that they made to the world.

Dad was a very responsible man, who taught me to be responsible for the lives of others to the greatest extent of my ability. Dad spoke truth with great conviction. He helped others as long as he was able to help.

Mom was a committed teacher, who influenced the lives of myriad individuals as long as she was able to keep her thoughts marching in lock-step. Even when the traditional methods of communication failed her, she kept reaching out to us in song and in stories that often had to be punctuated with counting numbers in order to keep her focused,...apparently.

C. S. Lewis left us The Chronicles of Narnia, but he wrote myriad other significant works as well. J. R. R. Tolkien rocked the world with The Hobbit trilogy and The Lord of the Ring trilogy with Silmarillion on the way to rival the first two sets. Neither seemed to be very flamboyant individuals in the flesh, but their writing has had a significant impact on the world in general and on this reader in specific.

I could give many other examples of people who have had a strong impact on the world historically and me personally. However, the point of this post is finishing well.

Did these individuals finish strong? If we define "strong" as lasting impact on History, then the answer is a resounding, "YES!" If we define "strong" as the condition of their physical bodies, then the answer would be, "No."

Dad spent his last two weeks on Earth in the CCU of a local hospital, but mercifully his COPD and pneumonia did not constitute a long-term fading. He left us on Good Friday in 2002.

Mom faded for more than a dozen years, always reaching out to her world in whatever way she had available to her. She was such a brilliant lady and she was so persistent. If one way didn't work, then she would try another. In the end her final fade until the passing over through Death's Doorway was nearly two days. When it became apparent that I needed to rush to her side, we were uncertain if she would be there at the end of my seven-hour trip, but she was. She waited for me. Then Mom lingered for another 26 hours as my brother and I said our final "Goodbye"s and "I-Love-You"s.

Mother's Day was hard for us yesterday because Mom made a lasting impact on our lives, which is pretty typical as mothers go.

C.S. Lewis along with Aldous Huxley both died in the shadow of the death of the American President, John F. Kennedy in the last half of 1963.

Writers may make the news to a lesser degree than world figures do, but often their lasting impact on History is just as significant.

J.R.R. Tolkien died in September, 1973 approximately nine months after the Roe v. Wade decision. I find it to be a considerable piece of trivia that one of History's greatest minds died at the end of one gestational-equivalent after it became legal to end the lives of generations of great minds at any point of gestation and for any reason or for no reason at all.

How different would our world be without these four individuals?

How different is our world without the myriad souls,
who might have made a lasting impact on our world,
if only they had been allowed to live?

Finishing well follows be allowed to begin in the first place.

by Jay O'Toole
on May 15th, 2017