“Avoid Dis-ease” Blog #38

When we are very small, the house we live in, looks very big.

When we get older into our early 20s, our parents suddenly seem very old. It is only

when a person becomes sick, and then is ready to die, one may ask, “could one have

avoided dis-ease?”

I remember being twenty three years old and out of college. I was living in Arizona

and working for a radio and television station. It was almost Christmas and I asked

for some time off to go home and visit my family. My father had become seriously

ill with cancer, so I was anxious to see him. I remember the day I flew in and walked

in the back door quietly. For some reason, I knew I needed to be quiet.

It was a small house but with lots of history. My mother had a gift for decorating on

a shoe string budget of Salvation Army knick knacks and relative hand me downs.

She was at work still and I saw a fire burning in our fireplace. My father was stretched

out on the sofa with his hands crossed over his chest and sound asleep. He lay there in

his dress pants and collored shirt. I studied him quietly and took a closer look from

when I had seen him last. He was still extremely handsome. Though his dark black hair

was thinning, his thick eye brows outlined his rectangular face. He still had the look of

an Errol Flynn movie star who had painfully aged, and now so had he. There was

something very sad that immediately jumped out at me. His wedding band on his left

hand was taped over and over. He had used white adhesive medical tape, now the

band looked small with the big mound of tape holding it on his slim, long finger.

I just sat there across from him in front of the fire. I was thinking how safe I felt when he

was sleeping, after all these years, I still felt this way. There was such a complex

chemistry between us that I really needed this quiet solitude briefly, before he would

awake. I knew once he woke, he would spin his web of charm and it did not matter

whether truth or fiction, I would be sucked into his tarnished ruin of reality once again.

Then, just nine months later, I was called home once again. This time the disease

that had riddled his body took over and controlled to the end. My father died at the ripe

old age of fifty-two years old. I do remember thinking at the time, “I know he has

suffered with all his sickness, and for so long, yet he was old too”…….. Old?

I was young at twenty three and he was old at fifty two.

Why did I go into detail about this one segment of my life? How does this have

anything to do with my Blog? I started the Blog in memory of my daughter who died

so young and riddled with dis-ease as well.

When my daughter was born, had my father taken care of his health, he would only

have been sixty two years old. Such a very sad fact of life. Good Mental Health is major

important to conquering dis-ease. Many books have been written attributed to body,

mind and spirit. Feed the body and the mind good health and the spirit will soar. “Mind

over matter”. Books go on to state that “you are what you eat”. So many other books

state that you can heal your own life by taking the reins of “good, mental and physical

thought, bring good health overall.

There is a very famous book written by Louise Hay “You can Heal Your Life”. Louise

believes, as do I, that “mental patterns can create dis-eases in the body”. She

advocates for positive exercizes over and over again and states how healing these

exercises are to a person. Its amazing how simple she puts the recipe for life out there

for us to follow. She believes that “all is perfect, whole and complete. I have within me

all the ingredients for success. Whatever I am guided to do will be a success. I learn

from every experience………..”{ Louise Hay}

How major is this statement. I learn from every experience. My father had, early on in

his twenties, been a super success. He had worked and gained notoriety as a life

insurance salesman and made a huge living, worked and lived in Chicago. His early

huge income along with his smoking and constant binge drinking got the best of him.

He divorced his first wife and on his way to oblivion, met my mother, got her pregnant,

then with their children and all his responsibilities in tow, he decided never to go back to

a good job again. He only addressed the family business at hand, through drunken

eyes of permanent disenchantment. He drank from morning until late into the night.

I must confess, I seldom ever saw him sober. His reality become diluted in the never

ending need for liquor. He sold things throughrout our house for liquor when he didn’t have any money for drinking. On the days he waited for my mother to come home from work, he slept on the

sofa. His mind and body became so delapitaded with dysfunction, daily drama and

dis-ease, that in the end, he looked very, very old. At ten years old, Bridget could have,

if my father would have avoided dis-ease, known her grandfather to be seventy two

years old. Its not uncommon to have a daughter who is twenty and who still sees her

grandfather at eighty two years old. Yet in our family, that was not to be. How many

sad, unspent , no memory years of no grandfather, and for what? The almighty drink of

alcohol. He traded in his life and all the memories of grandchidren for this? My father

left everyone behind in the dust for the “almighty drink” and then he became dust.

Bridget traded in her life and all the memories of her little children growing up for drugs

and liquor? So My father and Bridget are now gone into memory of the dead. My

fathers’ choices affected anyone and everyone around him, and not in a good way.

There is a memory to every family. What memory are you making for your family?

Every family is fallible, fragile and needs forgiving. How do we handle dis-ease?

I do believe that after my father died, I got angry. I ran away into my mind and my

job and my life for many years. When tragedy struck, I ran away into the dis-ease

of dark drinking and dysfunction of the abyss that disabled me. I didn’t realize that

when I decided to marry it was time again, time to start over and raise and show my

children TRUTH. It was time for me to avoid dis-ease if I could. But some family habits

carry over to generations.

Alas, sometimes drinking becomes too easy and too simple and too “quick’ of a solution

to temporarily avoid all the pain. I am certainly not going into the pain today. I will only

tell you it was never easy. There were some horrific moments of sadness, regret and

fear. As I look back, I see now, had I been “aware of the TRUTH inside me”, had I faced my

fears without the dreaded help of drinking, life would have been so much easier.

However through my sadness came my FAITH, Then and only then my belief in my

Lord took the place of unnecessary heartache. I said, “when the student is ready the

teacher appears”. and so HE did. The Dear Lord has given me a chance to share with

you today all the internal insights that helped me overcome my darkness and extreme

adversity. So I close today hoping you heard the obvious. Hoping you heard the good

news of how you too, can over come anything that tries to keep you full of fear. For you

now know the recipe for FAITH.

I ask you, “today are you ready to awaken to HIM and avoid dis-ease?

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