BagOfNothing.com

Archive for the ‘Touching’ Category

One of my friends, better yet, one of my mentors, recently lost his mother and eulogized her earlier this week.  Here’s part of it, I found it quite touching, and think we all can benefit from reading it.

I always wonder what people will think of me when I’m gone, I hope it can be as nice as this.

A very wise woman by the name of [name removed] helped me to put my mom’s passing into perspective.  She said that while we all die, remember that there are two types of deaths; the first is a death filled with tears because someone left this world much too young without ever realizing their potential, like my brother Jean.  The second is the passing of someone who lived a long, rich and rewarding life. We may miss them, but they had a chance to live al long life.  She also said to remember, we’d all be together before you know it.

Mom raised her family, helped raise her grandchildren and watched them grow into the two fine young men they are today.  She and dad were married nearly sixty years, not many people are lucky enough to have that!  And best of all, they had a long and active retirement doing whatever they pleased whenever they pleased!

Life may not be the party we expected it to be, but we owe it to ourselves to dance like crazy while we’re here, and boy did mom and dad dance together in this life, and always tried to include the rest of us in the fun!

Three things I’ll always remember about my mama; first, her eyes always lit up when she saw me, from the time I was a little boy, to the present, she was always happy to see me!

Second, she never started an argument that I can recall, that doesn’t mean she didn’t argue she just never started one.  She was always more than willing to end an argument though, one way or another; of course she got rid of the strap when we got older!

Finally, mom was always ready to forgive.  We sometimes give our folks problems, teenagers seem to know it all, but no matter what, mom always forgave me.  One thing in this world I never doubted, mom’s unconditional love and forgiveness, dad’s too!  They both did their absolute best for all of us.

Larger Pic

One of my college friends, a mother of three, had cancer several years back and was able to beat it.

Unfortunately I learned the news over the weekend that the cancer has returned.

If you have room for a spare prayer or two, please be sure to keep Allyson and her family in your prayers.

She recently made a post about her ordeal, below is a portion of it that really tugged at my heart, especially the part where she tells her kids.

And yes, that makes two friends from college that I know have cancer, and oddly enough, both are from the Houston area.

Yesterday was the day that we had to tell our children that their mommy has cancer. Again.

I would give up every single one of my good-day memories if it meant that I could have kept yesterday from happening. Forever etched in my mind will be the swollen-from-crying-green eyes of my oldest son as he looked at me and said, “Mommy, please don’t die.”

Tomorrow I will go back to the operating room. The plan is for my oncologist to remove the 2 tumors that are growing in my abdominal cavity and on my colon, to apply intraoperative chemotherapy, and then to insert a port for post-surgery chemo access.

My heart is torn, and my emotions are raw. I am scared. I am angry. I am thankful. I am still blessed.

A lot of things will change for me in the coming days. I will be sick, I will be weak. I will not be able to attend Goliath’s scout meetings or to cheer for my 5-year-old karate kid from the sidelines. I won’t teach preschool, I won’t do much cooking, and I will not take Baby to the library.

But in the midst of my heartache, my God remains the same. He was faithful before, and I believe He will be faithful again. I wish so much that I could understand why I must endure this. Little Middle asked me yesterday, “Mommy, why do you have to have cancer?” The answer could only be, “I don’t know why God lets bad things happen to good people.” But I do know that the God who gave me those three precious boys holds me and my cancer in the palm of His hand.

This post caught my attention because the writer seems so honest about his feelings and what’s going on in this world.

As I was thinking about this column, there was a part of me that knew I had to write about Haiti and there was another part that simply wanted to ignore it.

On the one hand, we are faced with a humanitarian disaster in Porte-au-Prince that cannot be ignored. An estimated 200,000 people have died. Thousands have been traumatically injured, and many of them will die of their injuries or disease. These people are not just statistics, they are men and women and children with faces and names and feelings. Those who survive will be living in a ruined country without hospitals, utilities or housing. Finding water and food is a daily struggle. Haiti was a basket case before the earthquake and now there is not even a basket.

On the other hand, I want to ignore Haiti. I am suffering from what has been called compassion fatigue. Or maybe it is simply despair. The economy of the world is in the toilet. Unemployment in the U.S. will stay around 10 percent for the rest of the year. Wars are going on in Iraq, Afghanistan and all over Africa. There are millions of refugees around the world. Because of global warming, humanity is heading pell-mell toward an ecological cataclysm that will make the Haitian disaster pale to insignificance. And partisan politics has created gridlock in Washington making it impossible to deal with any of these crises.

Check out the full post here.

CONCORD, N.H. – It was Harriet Richardson Ames’ dream to earn her bachelor’s degree in education. She finally reached that milestone, nearly three weeks after achieving another: her 100th birthday.

On Saturday, the day after receiving her diploma at her bedside, the retired schoolteacher died, pleased that she had accomplished her goal, her daughter said. Ames had been in hospice care.

“She had what I call a ‘bucket list,’ and that was the last thing on it,” Marjorie Carpenter said Tuesday.

Ames, who turned 100 on Jan. 2, had earned a two-year teaching certificate in 1931 at Keene Normal School, now Keene State College. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in South Newbury, and later spent 20 years as a teaching principal at Memorial School in Pittsfield, where she taught first-graders.

Through the years, she had taken classes at the University of New Hampshire, Plymouth Teachers College and Keene State to earn credits for her degree. With her eyesight failing, she stopped after retiring in 1971 and was never sure if she had enough credits.

Her wish for a degree became known when a Keene State film professor interviewed her a couple of years ago for a piece on the college’s own centennial, which the school celebrated last year.

The school decided to research her coursework and see if it could award Ames her long-sought diploma. The offices of the provost, registrar and other departments worked quickly in the last month to determine, that indeed, it could.

Full Article

People In Order: 1. Age from James Price on Vimeo.

Surf dog Ricochet’s inspirational video highlighting her journey from service dog training, to turning disappointment into a joyful new direction, to surfing with quadriplegic surfer, Patrick Ivison, to fundraising for charitable causes.

[Thanks, Heath!]

Kim Peek, the autistic savant who inspired the Oscar-winning film Rain Man, has died, aged 58.

Mr Peek’s father Fran said that his son had suffered a major heart attack on Saturday and was pronounced dead at a hospital in Salt Lake City, Utah, the town where he had spent his life.

Mr Peek was probably the world’s most famous savant. Described as a confounding mixture of disability and genius, his astonishing ability to retain knowledge inspired the writer Barry Morrow to write Rain Man, the 1988 movie starring Dustin Hoffman that won four Academy Awards.

Born in 1951 in Salt Lake city, Mr Peek was diagnosed as severely mentally retarded and his parents were advised to place him in an institution and forget about him. Thirty years later, he was classified as a “mega-savant,” a genius in about 15 different subjects, from history and literature and geography to numbers, sports, music and dates.

By the time of his death he had committed more than 9,000 books to memory and Nasa made him the subject of MRI-based research, hoping that technology used to study the effects of space travel on the brain would help explain his mental capabilities.

Full Article

I understand you don’t have to watch all these videos, but if you can make time to watch this first one, I think you find it well worth your time.

A short but heart-wrenching documentary about a man that puts his dog to sleep.

Language warning. Oh, and have some tissue near by.

Last Minutes with ODEN from phos pictures on Vimeo.

Welcome to the U.S. web site of the Mouth and Foot Painting Artists (MFPA). Formed in 1956, the MFPA is an international, for-profit association wholly owned and run by disabled artists to help them meet their financial needs. Members paint with brushes held in their mouths or feet as a result of a disability sustained at birth or through an accident or illness that prohibits them from using their hands.

Link

“Flowers from the Meadow” by Benavides

A kid has cancerous tumors in both eyes, one eye was removed and the other eye was saved through treatment.

Cancer reappears eigtht times, and he is able to beat it.

Cancer comes back yet again, and he must have his only functioning eye removed.

His favorite football team is the USC Trojans, and head coach Pete Carroll gave the 12-year-old a chance to see everything he wanted about the program before losing his vision for ever.

He even got to meet his favorite player . . . a lineman.

Read/watch the segment here, you’ll be amazed by his attitude.

It made me shed a tear.

The only day Joseph and Laura Presutto spent apart in their 61 years of marriage was Monday, the day between their deaths.

“They have been inseparable for that entire time,” Donna Presutto said of her parents.

Laura Presutto died Sunday. Husband Joseph died Tuesday. Both were 86.

“It was definitely a love story,” said Brenda Orlando, their nurse at Mercy Franciscan at West Park, the nursing home where the couple died.

Full Article

President Obama’s arrival in China on Sunday is being eagerly awaited by many people, especially one young woman in Shanghai. Lou Jing is of mixed race, with a Chinese mother and an African-American father. She became famous nationally after her participation in an American Idol-type program sparked a spate of vitriolic online racist abuse.

For Lou, the reality television show turned out to be a lesson in brutal reality. The talent contest is called Go! Oriental Angel, and the 20-year-old made it through preliminary rounds to become one of 30 contestants.

In her two months on air, Lou was nicknamed the “Chocolate Angel” and the “Black Pearl” by the media. She wasn’t bothered by these names, she says.

But online, the poison pens were venomous. Chinese posting messages on the Web criticized her skin color as “gross” and “ugly”; they called her shameless for appearing on television. The worst insults were reserved for her mother for having had a relationship with an African-American out of wedlock. Lou and her mother are now suing one Shanghai newspaper for libel.

There were online statements of support as well, but the verbal attacks stunned Lou.

Full NPR Article

I found some of these videos on Barry’s blog and just had to make sure my readers saw them as well.

Yup, dogs miss those that are deployed.

It started as a parent’s personal journal to their younger daughter Gracie, so she would be able to remember her 6-year-old sister, Elena, who was diagnosed with pediatric brain cancer.

Though her parents didn’t want her to know the severity of her cancer, they feel that she must have known what was happening. The tumor slowly took away her ability to talk.

But Elena was still able to write.

After Elena passed away, her parents discovered that their daughter had left a message behind for them — a lot of messages, actually.

“We started to pull out notes and they would be in between CDs or between books on our bookshelf,” Keith Desserich said.

Then the couple started finding them everywhere.

Full Article