Just The Lovely

The human body is amazing in its ability to heal and perform a bazillion other functions. This was never more evident to me than in July when I fell off the top rung of a ladder while stepping onto my roof. I landed on the concrete driveway on my back. Since I fell backwards I had zero ability to control how I fell and knew it could be very bad, and in the second or two before I hit the ground my mind went nearly blank. Everything around me went black and my thinking was dulled. I’m so thankful for this because it eliminated my fear, and I’d like to think that’s what happens to everyone who goes through a physically traumatic event. My mind did will itself to one thing though and that was the image of two men in my family – my Dad and my Grandpa, and really the Lightner family in general. I knew if it were them, they’d survive this fall.

It’s amazing to me that the psyche can bring people so close it’s as good as if they were there. It speaks to the incredible job the elder members of our family have done to instill strength in the rest of us. I almost want to say that my Grandpa, who has passed away, intentionally brought himself to my mind, but haven’t figured out how to fit that into my Biblical view of life and death. As far as my Dad goes, I think that years of saving me from near disaster have given him hero status in my mind, even when I haven’t wanted to admit it at times. Even after years of asserting my independence from him, I knew when I asked for him from my ED stretcher that he’d drive the hundreds of miles between us to be there. I’m thankful I had a Dad I could always count on while growing up, who would be at my school performances, who wouldn’t tease me for playing with dolls at 12 years old, who would impossibly find and drag me out of an underwater drop-off in the ocean, who would buy me things that my mom wouldn’t :-) In a somewhat related note, I heard about this blog (My Parents Were Awesome) on the news this morning. Check it out. I really need to get my parents on there since they were a couple of cool cats back in the day.

My dad and grandma - you can tell she thought he was the cat's meow. (I'm not sure what's up with my cat cliches today either)