find your passion

Passion week seems like the perfect time to speak of finding your personal passion.  It coincides with a week spent grieving the loss of an amazing coworker.  A life spent in education, a positive, joyful woman, her life cut tragically short by an automobile accident.  She and her husband both taken shortly before their retirement.  The time of life when the freedom to do all of the things for which you didn't have time.  Leaving behind family, friends and acquaintances reeling with the suddenness and shock of it.

My message is this--life is too short.  Don't count on doing "it" (whatever it is for you) later, when you retire, when the kids leave, when you can afford it, when you have more time.  If it is something you feel strongly about, do it now.  We don't have the luxury of knowing when our time on earth is up.  Find the joy, find the passion, do what you love.  Spend time with your loved ones.  Kiss your kids, your spouse.  Tell people that you love them and how much they mean to you.

I am guilty of waiting, not making the time now.  If my friend and coworker Joan and her death have taught me anything, it is that the time is NOW.  Not later.

In loving memory of Joan and Neil Coe.  You may be gone, but your spirit lives on.

some days

It is a weary day.  Yesterday were electives at school, and a good deal of my students and myself were downhill skiing.  Tired teachers and tired students.  It was a wonderful day....

But this morning at school I found out that the baby brother of one of my students died.  He was strangled trying to get out of a makeshift crib.  This same family had the next child older almost killed by being run over by a skidsteer loader last summer.  That child spent months in Sick Kids hospital.  The baby who died yesterday was born while his brother recovered in the hospital.  It makes me absolutely heartsick. 

My grief for this family is mixed with anger.  How can they not take care of their children and ensure their safety?  Another older brother lost his lower leg in a haymower accident when he was a little guy.  How is it that children become almost expendable?  Instead of treating them as precious and worthy of utmost care, their lives are squandered.  The horror experienced by that baby as he slowly strangled to death, all alone.  It would not have been an easy/quick end to a too short life.

There are too many "accidents" in this community.  Too many children seriously injured.  Fathers losing limbs in farming accidents.  Children dying in preventable accidents.  When will it stop?  Has there been an investigation into these accidents of little ones?

And how does this affect the other children in the family?  The grief that will be silenced and held within the self-isolated community.  It appalls me.  I grieve for the family, the children and the community.  But I feel that there needs to be accountability.  Children are to be treasured and protected, not left to accident and injury.

I know I need to get past the feelings of anger, and do whatever I can to support the children that are at school who will be dealing with this.  It makes me feel ill.  And incredibly saddened that I would not be welcomed at the funeral for this baby.

It is a somber end to the week preceding our holiday.  Sadly, many in this community will not be having a fun vacation.