Like Fragile Flowers…Life’s Harder Lessons

I’ve learned that there are people in our lives who are like a fragile flower, beautiful and strong on the outside, but when the petals are pulled apart, you realize they are often the ones we will have to say goodbye to before we are ready.

I learned this first in adaptive, P.E class where a newspaper memory of a young woman who’d die before I could meet her, hung, a sad reminder to the teacher who had grown to know her to care for. He was a good man, a man who obviously had a passion for what he was doing, but there was always a sense of sadness in that room.

They had quoted her in the article, and the line still sticks with me today. “I long to feel the damp grass beneath my feet, I long to run free.”

I met other students that taught me lessons too, but the strongest lesson came from that girl I never got to know in life, but her words reverberate with me to this day.

You see, we have a condition in our family, one that slowly eats at our muscles, I’m blessed I can still walk, but knowing what might come is enough to terrify you, which is why I choose not to dwell on it, but I’ve lost a cousin to this condition, and having another one living with it, the fear is there. I was never officially diagnosed, but I have most of the same limitations they do, but I can walk, I can hold my great niece…