How many times have you heard someone say ‘life is too short’? Probably more times than you can count. Now, how many times have you actually listened to those words? Probably not as often as you would like. I know I’m guilty of that too. There are days that end and leave me wondering what the heck I even accomplished yet I still felt like I had so much I didn’t have a chance to do. I was thinking about just that the other day. How many times I’ve intended to call someone, see how a friend is doing, or send a card to someone just to let them know I’m thinking of them. I’m sad to say that those three things tend to fall to the wayside more often than I’d like to admit. You tend not to give that too much thought though until you’re forced to think about how much of life we take for granted.
During my high school years, my girlfriends and I would plan out our lives. We would plan to travel the world, become successful in careers we loved, find love, fall out of love, and giggle together as we created our perfectly imaginative lives. I distinctly remember how we would joke about growing old and how we would probably still be gathering together laughing and sharing stories with each other.
As the years passed, I’m so happy that we still maintained our friendship even though we all went our own directions. There were 5 of us and we were more than just friends. We loved and argued as more than friends. Then one day 5 became 4. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t how life was supposed to go. At 30 years old, I lost one of my closest friends to cancer. The worst part, our friendship ended in such a terrible way and there’s no real way to ever repair that again. It was fitting, she and I had no issues arguing with each other. Both of us opinionated, stubborn, and a bit tempered, we would go through waves. We would laugh, joke, argue, forgive, forget, and repeat. It was a cycle, sometimes an unforgiving one, and it ended before we reached the forgiveness part. It ended before I was really ready for it to end. A year before she was diagnosed I suffered my first miscarriage. I was absolutely heartbroken over it. When she found out about it, she sent me a lovely smelling hand cream and a card. It’s the one you see in the photo with the flowers. She wrote that every time I put on the hand cream it would a hug from London (where she lived) and that she loved me to the moon and back. I had every intention of sending her card back. One that told her that I loved her back and that she couldn’t imagine what receiving that card meant to me, and that I was sorry for whatever we were mad at each other about because it didn’t matter. But I was so consumed by grief that I pushed it off, telling myself it could wait. Then grief turned into time and as time passed, I forgot to send that card. I put that card away and it got lost in the everyday busyness.
I found that card the other day, as I was cleaning out the basement. I’ll never have the chance to send her it. I’ll never again get the chance to say ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I love you to the moon and back’. Those chances, the ones I took for granted, are gone.
So don’t wait until tomorrow or a day that may never come. It might sound grim but sometimes the truth is. So turn that truth into something positive and send your friend a card. It doesn’t need to be lengthy or expensive. Just something that says ‘I love you to the moon and back.’
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