Life Goes On

Every week for the past 10 years, this client has come in for a wellness massage. This client’s plate is full. A small business, multiple children in expensive colleges, and the biggest reason he has for a weekly massage: his wife has lupus.

Weekly massages have helped along the way. Last month, this client told me “If I hadn't been getting massages, I think my head would have exploded a long time ago.”

It has been a hard row. Multiple treatments, some experimental, and now the lupus appears to be gone. But the damage to internal organs is great. His wife had emergency surgery last week and it is possible that the end is near.

I feel compassion for this client; I feel helpless, too. The one thing he and his family want most of all appears to be slipping away. This time the family Christmas may be the saddest of all.

I must say most people could not handle the stress of all this going on at once. Lots of people would shirk at least some of these problems if not all. It would be easier to think, “I didn't sign up for this.”

An acquaintance said those exact words to me one day when I was relating the story of how my spouse had a heart attack and bypass during a Hawaiian vacation. She would not stayed around, she said. It would have been a good time to exit, stage right, leaving the “relatives” to handle the situation.

I was shocked. I have to say, “I did not sign up for this,” never crossed my mind.

We don’t sign up for things knowing they are coming, of course. Things happen, life changes and we make the best of it. It is our lot in life to take good and hard times, challenges and joys.

How we do these things is our measure. Heroic measures by the day.