So lately, thanks to brilliant blog posts by writers like Jo Knowles and Tim Wynne Jones, I've been thinking a lot about what it means to love life and to really live it. Jo's post ponders Maurice Sendak's NPR interview where he implores people to live their lives, and the sadness and urgency that he has as he expresses that thought as he, himself, is in the last months of his own life.

And for me, that is even more poignant as I listened to my own father sob on the phone last Friday, lamenting a family member who is still alive with us, but whose personality has been twisted by drug use. 

"Where is that person I used to know?" my dad asked. "Where is that person I was so proud of?"
  
I told him that the person is still there, buried beneath the drugs, that their soul is still a bright light underneath all the layers of drug dependence and anger and need. 

But it made me wonder about how people can change for good or for bad, about how we are all a product of our choices and our intentions. 

"Our family is shrinking," my dad said, "and I am so alone. In the mornings, when it is bleak, I look out at the cold trees and I am so very lonely."

I listed all the people my father has, all the people who love him. My sister and all her grown kids live near him. His brother and his sister-in-law have him to dinner every single night. He has friends still alive that he has gone on grand adventures with, but the worry about his drug-addled relative has devastated him. All the good things don't matter any more because he has chosen to only look at the horror of the present. 

And that's sad.

And it's easy and normal to feel that way. 

And I have felt this way too -- times when I am impossibly sad even though I am one of the luckiest humans in the universe -- times when I think that the days are too cold to leave the bed and walk the dogs and eat. But the thing is, you fight through them. It isn't that life is a gift. It isn't that life is a curse. It's just that life is. It is. And we are meant to experience it and travel through it and we can choose to make that journey have meaning like poets do, like Jo does, like Tim does, or we can choose to just manage, to slug through. Our choices can change. Our intentions can change. Our purpose can change. It doesn't matter. What matters is that we are meant to experience this life - this great big is -- and how we do experience it is up to us. 

And so in that phone call I had with my dad I told him, "I love you. What is happening to our relative is not your fault and not all your responsibility and whatever choices you make, you will make with love, and that is all that matters. What matters, Dad, is that you love, that you have always loved, and that you always will love with all your heart."

He said with a shaking 84-year-old hobbit man voice, "I am such a coward. I am so scared. I am so scared for him."

But my little dad isn't a coward. He faces his pain, his sorrow, his worries, his life head on. He touches the sad, hurt parts of his own soul and knows them. My dad doesn't hide. He doesn't pretend to be someone he isn't. 

"Being scared doesn't make you a coward," I tell him. "You have never run away from life, Dad. You will never run away, and that makes you one of the bravest men of all."