Remembering Sadly, and Affirming

Good morning. It's early and it's pouring rain outside.

I have been sad this week because this week marks the eleventh anniversary of the beginning of my son's long paralysis.  What a terrible time it was. So many hopes absolutely smashed to the ground, such a valuable life crippled, and then taken eventually.

The rain made me remember something though.  That few weeks after Greg's injury, it just rained and rained.  It rained as if to keep with the great grief the family were going through as he lay there unconscious and half dead.

But in a month or so, something happened. Gregory came to, and began the great travail that marked the rest of his life.  I started playing music for him on tapes. First I got "morning Bach," but then I got a great tape of the Holberg Suite or Concerto by Grieg. A great piece of music, buoyant and optimistic.  He "woke up" to that music, and since he was such a musician I know it meant a lot to him.  He was unable to speak for a long time due to that awful tube they put down your throat, but I'll never forget the moment that he got his voice back and spoke to all the wonderful nurses who'd been caring for him at the hospital.  It makes all the difference to be attending to a mute uncommunicative blob, and to be hearing next in a deep young man's voice, "Jeannine, you are absolutely beautiful!"

That same month I noticed a great rarity.  The rains which had come in profusion had also done something wonderful for a lot of our dozing plants. Great lilies which had been gleaming their green leaves for years with nary a flower began to put out huge crimson bouquets of bloom. We had a profusion of flowers from everything from those lilies, to cacti, to the last thing Greg planted before he went into the hospital:  wonderful variegated nasturtiums.

Those nasturtiums are still with us, transferred from the big house we lived in next door to this little house here.  They bloom and thrive in pots and in the ground, and they are still coming up in the grass all the time.  I prick them out with a paring knife and plant them in pots.  "Here's Gregory," I say to all who would listen.  And he continues to bloom and thrive through eleven years' worth of growing.
That is an affirmation, is it not?  We affirm life, and growth, and we praise God, even through our tears.  YAZZYBEL