My Live Again story of Cathy: Don’t Wait for My Funeral
Special thanks to Nadine El Khoury for doing a featured short on Cathy with her battle with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (i.e ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease) and gastric cancer.
Cathy’s wisdom: “I don’t know any other disease that’s works like A.L.S., but at the same time A.L.S. has been a gift to me. There are people who would say, that I’m crazy to say that and I understand that. How is it a gift to me? About a year before, I was diagnosed. My friend’s mom died and we all got together, said wow, we should do this again.
Well we didn’t, until I got diagnosed. And then I wrote to my friends and said, here I said, we thought about it at her mom’s funeral, I have a fatal illness. Let’s not wait, don’t wait for my funeral. Let’s get together now, so that’s what we’re doing. Friends I’ve had from Kindergarten, we’re getting together now and we do it on a regular basis.
It’s not just one dinner, and, and they’re all getting this idea, don’t wait, don’t wait to share love. Joining a support group for A.L.S., I’ve made wonderful, wonderful friends, some of them died and that’s sad.
Some of them are still going along pretty well and one of my friends, Karina, I absolutely love her, I adore her, we have so much fun. We laugh and we make fun of A.L.S. and you know what, if I didn’t have A.L.S. I would never have met her and she’s this wonderful friend. I was telling about things that happened, can also become something beautiful, because it does open up and it’s real. When you get together with your friend, you’re not talking about your new car, not you know, who has the best new hairdo or any of that kind of thing.
Why can’t you do this? Just like I don’t think there’s any disease worse than A.L.S. I don’t think there is anything better than connecting on the soul level of friends.”
Thanks Nadine and Cathy for sharing this story on the Live Again platform. Let’s not wait to live more fully, love more passionately, and connect more deeply. You can watch the YouTube version of this story @ https://youtu.be/yBuNmwwhKi
