【實用健康app】A Quilted Memoir|最夯免費app-綠色工廠好玩App

Preface

This book is called A Quilted Memoir, and it honors loss. It is my hope that it will help other caregivers who are grieving their loved ones who have cancer. In this memoir, I hope to impart something uplifting to get them through some hard times.

Like an old quilt, it contains many pieces of material all sewn together. This book is a combination of diary entries, journaling and recollections about the letting go of my very best friend, my husband, Rob. Rob died of sarcoma cancer at age 58 on April 23, 2008. In sharing our journey together through this terminal illness, I hope to bring support and enlightenment to the caregivers, the medical community and the families who lose loved ones to cancer. I am sharing my loss with the hope of helping others. In telling my story, I believe something good will come out of this pain. The flashbacks in this book are memories from the terminal diagnosis through the emotional journey after Rob's passing.

As a journalist, I create documentaries for non-profit organizations. All interviewees tell intimate truths or awakenings they have experienced. Now it is time for me to share the lessons from this difficult path with a loved one.

Epilogue

Three years after Rob's death I am still grieving, but the days are brighter now. Rob may be gone, but our souls are intertwined. His spirit lives forever in my heart and in the heart of our family.

I was at Rob's mother's bedside one week before she died. This helped me grieve her oldest son. Comforting his mother reinforced my self-esteem that I can still go on. It gave me a higher purpose. Being with another loved one on her last critical days helped me. Reading Psalms and holding her hand fed my soul. I felt tremendous love in the hospital room when she lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed it.

It is the pull of human kindness that lifts us to embrace the here and now. There is quiet reassurance that the pieces will somehow be sewn back together. Like the squares on the quilt, we are all interconnected carefully designed by Our Maker.

Sometimes all I can do is trust that everything is exactly as it should be. I try to move through life growing in grieving, and changing in the right direction. Every day holds a new chance to embrace something good.

With the passage of time, I am now able to experience joy. Its different from the giddy happiness I thought joy meant years ago. To me, joy now is more a place of peace. I have to honor my grief in order to go inside my spirit and touch the lives of other people. I want people to know that hope is the gift, and its not in the outcome, its in the process. In the end, our quilt will be completed and we will go home to God.