My Sponsors to Life
In just a few short years I will reach my sixth decade and I’m watching my parents fade rapidly as my children become men. For me I have this great deep feeling of beautiful emotions regarding my parents, those who sponsored my appearance into this world even with that great distance of time and space, I wonder how it is with my children. I try to reach back in my mind to events and without the aid of pictures/words my mind is limited and I do recall beautiful times but the most amazing thing to me is that my chest has this great bursting with mixed feelings of love, security, peace, excitement, tears, joy, hope, fear, adventure, tears again for and with my Mother and Father as if they are beside me.
I know that my siblings are going to great effort to care for my parents in their later years and I am very grateful to them, as I am restrained to race to my parents’ sides by my self-imposed commitments, to wife and child soon, which I embrace with great delight.
I believe this world is made of words when I lack words I see less when I have a word I see the greater details that just wasn’t there before. As the cave that just reflects the shadows of the light or that just has the echo of the thousand words that flip by us with the motion of time — the shadow or word is never enough. My education was the learning of logic and later language which has allowed me to challenge my silly assumptions of words and time but it never filled my soul.
What fills my soul and gives me sturdiness are those emotions, not the ardent world of words, and when I reach back within my heart my earliest and strongest feelings come from my parents. I was lucky they loved me and my siblings. My feelings don’t appear to be caged by time but they seem to reach further than my memory of time and in many ways, I feel my Mom holding me and caring for me as my Dad embraced us. When religion speaks of a god less loving than my parents I scoff at such religions. I know by stories and experience that they had their hard times with each other but this is not my feelings of them.
I expect that my parents will die and I will die but they lived an amazing life. Really I have also live an amazing life. Although these words and time may die, something appears to stand, my feelings. I remember — I contain a past — or so I think I do — partly because my friends and family allow me to repeat and polish my tales, but my feelings stand and grow.
I know that my parents steered me with words and a good boot as needed but what is clear to me as I have experienced this world that I embraced that boot and their words because of those emotions that they instilled in me.
I remember growing up having great pride in my parents, I liked to hang out with them from walking to playing to talking. I still consider to this day that my Dad is my best friend. I have given such an image of my Mom to my wife (the heavenly gift given to me) that my wife sees my Mother as the way that all women should behave.
They will die and sadly I will not hear their voices over the line but I will always hold them in my heart as they did me in words.
They gave me hope, they helped me be brave in faith, and in the end they allow me to touch love.
