Let’s talk about Legacies and memories and Truths. I bring this up as I am aging now and I have lived a long life in my eyes. I have outlived both of my parents lives, and my step-fathers too now. Going on 63, I have lived a life full of many memories, many laughs, many tears, and many recoveries throughout the years. I have seen people come and go, and many die. I have seen now, a complete life in my book. I don’t ask for materialistic things in life, never did, but as many know the older you live the more you accumulate, so belonging you always have. Yet what about people, what about those you love or care for, or those who care for you, for in the end they are the ones and the people that count.
My life, has never been the greatest or the best of everything, I wasn’t born into money or riches. My birth was even rough, on my mother, for I basically ruined her I was born so big at ten pounds, nine ounces, that, I tore her up coming out and she had to have her last three children cesarean style. Of course she blame me for it all, what did i know I wasn’t even here yet till they smacked my ass.
My childhood is filled with beatings, violence from my step-father, my older brother and my mother. Yet I survived it all in my own way, I escaped my home life when I could by playing in the woods, reading comic books, and then staying at others homes, and using their parents as surrogates to survive. It worked!
At 12 years old I had two paper routes to deliver seven days a week. I did it so I could have some cash for fun things and never got a penny of it for the two years I did it. My step-father took every penny I earned.elplessAt 14 we moved from one city to a new town, and life doesn’t get much better right? Wrong! I became the helper to my step-father to rebuild a home that was condemned when he bought it.We rebuilt it piece by piece, room by room, and the exterior too. We even added a five foot wall on top of an existing one so he could level the front yard. I ended up doing this for four years of my life, till I finally decided to leave and joined the military, just to get away from it all. I watched the violence my step-father did to us all and my mother too, and was helpless to stop him doing it.
I served first in The army, but only lasted six months due to immaturity, and was Discharged from there on a Trainee Discharge under Honorable Conditions. I returned home for two years, and joined the National Guard in my hometown, where I served from 1973 to 1978 five years, as i searched for job and a place in the world, living in a YMCA room.
At that point, I joined the United States Navy in December I would be in till 1989, when I was Medically Discharged for a back injury, after falling down a ladder and ridding 24 rungs on by back. Disabled is what they called me when they discharged me and gave me a check and said goodbye. The goodbye would be not just from the Navy that year, I also lost my home, my life, my first wife and two daughters, as she divorced me because I couldn’t find a job. It was april 1990 then, so I returned home, to run dead into a new mess. My step-father was dying of cancer and would die in October of 1990, then a she was dying my mother was diagnosed with cancer too, and she would die in October of 1991, one year and one day after her husband. It wasn’t easy paying to bury them both but I did do so with my sister and they rest together in one plot now.
I didn’t surrender, but was surprised and arrested for a crime I did not commit that December and placed in a jail cell in Virgina, where i was at first convicted, then, it was overturned by a Judge when a prosecutor read her notes and caught my ex-wife in her lies. Once released I still, didn’t give up.
I returned home and fought to survive again. I found a job eventually and started to recover. Got my own apartment I loved, and lived a quiet life.
My life changed in 1993 when I met my second wife, we danced the night away a few nights, then dated a few times and she invited me to live with her. That was 1993, it is now 2018, I am still with my wife, and have overcome all of my youth and troubles. we have a home all paid off, we have two of everything and we carry on together. 25 Years together, home paid off, no car bills and peace right! Wrong there will never be peace if you ask me, it’s not what life is about is it?
2006, Cancer came roaring back into my life, in my wife, as she came down with Breast Cancer. Chemo, radiation treatments, lasted a good year, and it went into remission for her. Was it done, was it over no.
2013, August, my phone rang, my Primary Doctor at The Veterans Hospital called me. in Her words, you need to get down here, and see a specialist, we found lung cancer in your right lung. Again the battle begin, a new one now, after seeing a specialist who sat before me and asked me what I wanted him to do, he removed a lobe and one third of my right lung and I survived.
But life has its legacies and it’s troubles doesn’t it. My wife’s breast cancer came roaring back in January 2016. More doctors, more tests, then for the last year or radiation treatment and chemo for her. It has progressed now to breast to bone and back out to tissue in her. We go to chemo for her three thursdays a month and on the fourth thursday we see her Doctor who is tracking her tumors, with scans CT and Bone.
I have cared for her daily and i love her to pieces and always will, yet who knows what shall come next.
So Legacies for me are simple, I have mine already, I write small stories and books. I keep my wife alive, I help her daughter, my daughters where and how I can and I have four natural grandchildren in Pittsburgh, PA and two more in Connecticut, I love greatly and miss cause I never see them or have the money or time to do so.
When I die my legacy will be simply put taking care of others when I could. I helped others where I could all my life. Friends I tried to advise, stood up for, know who they are. People I taught to draw, to laugh, and to love. Those are my legacies along with my small books and stories I write.
So when you think your legacy is how much money you made, or how many things you own, or how many children you had or grandchildren, you need to step back and realize, it’s none of the above thats a legacy, it’s how you treated others, and how they came out of it when you did that counts. A legacy is all about a life lived well, no matter if you were treated right or wrong yourself in it. It’s all about giving, not receiving folks.
I hope and pray that when I die, some will say I was a decent person, with decent morals, ethics and skills. That I cared about others and helped where I could, and never bothered anyone with my problems. No one is an island unto their own so to say, but I always tried to never, and i mean never, impose myself on anyone, at anytime.
Legacies are not materialistic items you pass down, they are morals, ethics, and what you do for others. They are how you treat others, and how you react to situations, they are indeed a life.
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