Dr. Doner’s Blog

Have you ever wondered if your life really mattered?

 

I’m preparing to turn 60. The career climb is over and the kids are raised. The new generation doesn’t want to listens to my advice. A life of experience has distilled into priceless wisdom and yet it sometimes feels as if no one wants it.

 

I remember my Dad turning 60. He usually wasn’t a complainer but something about this milestone was bothering him. Mom bought him a red leather Lazy-Boy recliner for a birthday present. That did not help his nagging feeling of waning vitality!

 

Recent funerals have also fueled this angst in me. We honor the dead, we miss them… and then life goes on. What did it all matter? Occupying this life is like occupying a house. Lots of decorations and getting the appearances just right, then POOF, time to move on. Time for the next person to occupy the space.

 

The distress came to a head last week. “What is this discomfort really about?” I cried . “It’s really about not wanting my life to be a waste! I have so many gifts and abilities. I don’t want them to just lie there, not used. It’s OK for a field to lie fallow for awhile but it’s not OK for my life not to be fully harvested!!”

 

With this freshly felt unease I planted my Mother. She’d been lying in the casket above ground for a month until the rains stopped and Florida soil drained. Now we finally laid her to rest. The celebration and hugs of the actual funeral were past. There was no more solace of food and friends or the illusion that she is just lying there asleep in a lovely purple outfit. Now she was simply lowered into a hole and covered with dirt, to get wet with next summer’s rains. She’d used her body well and now it was over.

 

“It’s now or never,” I thought. “Either I use these 60’s well or I don’t. Because someday I’ll return to the mud. How can I make my life matter?”

 

After the burial my sister and I visited our childhood home. We thought, “Why not knock on the door and see who is occupying it?” The owner was very happy to hear our old stories. We asked about remembered trees and plantings.

 

“Yes,” he assured us. “Our sons also had a tree house in that old oak.  But your mango trees froze and the orange trees died. There is something curious, however, that I never understood. Every spring a patch out front erupts into Easter lilies. My sons want to mow the area but I won’t let them. Each year we marvel at this magic and wonder where they came from!”

 

Those were my Easter lilies! I’d rescued them from the church after Easter. I remember carefully separating the bulbs and planting them at age 13. Idealistic even then, I had hoped that I was doing something permanent. That I was planting beauty that would never end. That what I was doing really mattered.

 

Yes, I’ve moved on, someone else was occupying my former space, but the lilies keep coming up.

 

Those Easter lilies had been symbolic of life after death. Now they were the answer to my current anguish. That there is resurrection of life within life. That all we ever do matters. We are all always planting bulbs, always affecting the people around us, always making a difference. We can’t control the outcome, just as Mom couldn’t control her kids. But there is always a consequence and there are great grandkids that keep bursting forth.

 

To want the 60’s to produce great accomplishments is just pure ego. To appreciate the time and space that it provides is my more enlightened vow. That I use it well to grow and to give– that’s all that really matters.

 

Kathy Doner, MD

copyright 2009