Staying alive for your wife and family I have always found pretty easy to do. But, I never found a way to stay alive just for myself. Even when I was trying to stay alive from 21 to 25 I stayed alive for my parents and friends and especially whatever girl I was going with or just dating at the time. I felt I owed it to them to stay alive (at least as long as I was dating them).
But, then everything changed when I got married and had my first child, a son. I found living for others worked for me and when I researched this I could see my forebears having families of 5 to 10 children often all the way back to about 1580 in Switzerland. So, I could see I come from a long line of Fathers and Grandfathers. This always made sense to me. Being single never really made sense to me. But, I learned a lot from dating a lot of girls and women from my age 15 to 25 when I got together with my first wife.
But, now I'm 78 years old and I mostly live on for my wife and children and grandchildren and friends since my parents are gone, my aunts and uncles are gone my grandparents were all gone by 1978 too.
Then by 2000 my cousins started dying one by one. Then my best friend from the "I AM" church passed away in 2006 then my mother and Aunt and Cousin and father in law all passed away in 2008 in one year. Then my best friend from high School that I met at age 10 died in 2011. I'm sort of grateful that most people I knew and loved died on 2011 or before because it would be much harder to lose someone really close to me now that I'm 78.
However, you likely understand this as well as I do. I met a lady in her 40s likely whose father just passed away and I remember how losing my father when I was 37 messed me up in many ways until I was 50 and almost died myself. I told her how I understood what she was experiencing and that I had already lost both my parents. And I could see it was helpful to her to know others have had to go through this level of grief and try to survive it too.
When you have good parents that are there for you in some ways losing them is like dying yourself. I first experienced this with my father in 1985 when I was 37. So, I could help my wife in 1999 survive the death of her mother too at age 74 which for her was very unexpected. I was worried I was going to lose my wife then and I would have to raise our 3 year old daughter like I had raised my son alone after he was 3 years old. Somehow my wife found the courage to stay alive for her daughter and me and her family and friends. So, this was a good thing.
But, having enough compassion for yourself and everyone you love and care about is one of the reasons people live to be 100 or more I find.
by God's Grace
