Appreciate

#reverb10 Day 14 Appreciate. What’s the one thing you have come to appreciate most in the past year? How do you express gratitude for it? (Author: Victoria Klein)

I wrote a post about appreciating ‘now’ but it was reminding me of a fictional book title from TV’s “Being Erica” — The Secret of Now — and that was not what I was trying to get across.

I do appreciate now as much as I can, but I forget to, a lot of the time, and it’s the same every year and I’ve even written this same blog post before, I know it. Now is nothing but a tiny bubble in my brain that pops and re-forms.

It wasn’t really an appreciation, anyway, it was more a realization. One in a series. People will die and you can’t do a damn thing about it. I don’t know if it’s appreciation as much as growing up. Being 36. Having one corner stacked 18-high with aging relatives and the other corner with my children requesting peanut butter toast as though there was nothing wrong.

They’re right. There is nothing wrong. Unless we run out of peanut butter.

My uncle died from his brain tumour this September. The week after he died, when I was done with the first wave of purple sad, the whole world was bright enough to hurt my eyes and sharp enough to hurt my skin. Everything was in my face. The red and yellow leaves smacked me in the eyeballs when I looked outside. A filter had been removed, I guess. The “everyone lives forever” filter.

Love this. Appreciate this. Remember this. See this. Someday it will be all you have left.

Maybe it’s death I appreciate. Without death waving at me from its comfy chair at the end of my life, I wouldn’t be reminded to live nearly so much.