Dear Lil,
I want to talk about that day. You know the one. Your mother was recently dead. Your grandmother was ill. You were laying on a broken down, single bed in a cold, nasty trailer. You were unemployed, so heavy you were perhaps unemployable, hopeless, depressed, and broken.
You couldn't breath.
For three days, you'd been struggling for air. All breathing was shallow, grasping, gasping, and never enough. Your heart would race in terrifying ways, and then slow to almost nothing. You were blacking out, fading out, falling into fits of unsatisfying sleep. You were starving for oxygen.
In your hand, you held your phone. You needed to call for help. You needed medical assistance in the most serious of ways. It was so easy to dial and you knew you still could.
Before you dialed though, before you reached out to ask for breath, there was a deeper question that you asked yourself.
Did you really wish to continue to live?
You asked yourself this, knowing full well you had total control over the situation. It was quite clear that if you didn't do something about your lack of oxygen, you would die. It would be easy to do so. Painful, surely. Scary, certainly. But easy. Perhaps easier than living.
You felt hyper real in that moment. You felt so much control, so much rationality. Life or death. All in your hands. There were so many good reasons to let the phone slide away. So few reasons you could think of to dial. Only one reason really, the main, most important reason that suddenly grabbed hold of you and shook you with its intensity.
I love you.
I love you and I always have. Even when no one else was there for you, I was. Even when all the world seemed out of sorts, I was there. Maybe I couldn't always come up with the best way through things. Maybe sometimes my plans were lacking, my motives lazy, my protection shoddy, but even then, I gave you what I could.
I love you, and for that reason, you decided to live. You dialed your doctor and within 24 hours, you had oxygen, you had tests and results and new plans for making things better. And all the while you were getting better, I was there, completely loving you, and so happy you would continue.
We've never talked much about that day. It happened and it's always in the back of the mind that it happened, but we don't discuss it. Maybe we haven't needed to. Maybe the silent, but binding commitment made between us was enough. Sometimes hitting a moment of such deep passion is too hard to put into words.
I hope you're not upset that I decided to talk about it. It's been almost three years now, and I felt it was time. I wanted you to know how proud I am of you. When you decided to call your doctor, when you decided to live, it wasn't about continuing to live the life you had. We both knew you deserved better. It was time to take steps, to move forward. Or, at least, it was time to choose a path.
I look at you today and I marvel at what you have become, how your definitions are changing. You are letting go of reactive in favor of reflective, you are letting go of indulgent in favor of independent. You are letting go of defeatist in favor of planner. You share more of yourself, your life, your thoughts. You give shelter. You give smiles to those in need. You are a bringer of joy, hoping that others can find the love you have found, the love that was always there for you.
You mean everything to me. You amuse me. You entertain me. You keep me awake at night telling me stories. I wouldn't trade you for the world and I'm so glad I didn't have to. And now every time we take a breath, I am reminded of how precious that is, how deep the fear can be at the thought of it now happening. I'm so thankful for the breathing, even if it involves tubing sometimes.
I'm thankful you choose to live your life with me, every second, every day. It makes me the luckiest person in the world.
Love,
Lil
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