What Really Matters

I had a wake up call the other day. It came in the form of an incapacitating dizzy spell that lasted for 24 hours. One day I was going about my normal activities and the next night I was crawling back to bed on my hands and knees, unable to stand upright for fear of falling down. I spent the entire next day lying in my recliner, getting up only to make the necessary trips to the bathroom, and holding onto the walls for balance.

Do you ever wonder what goes through someone’s mind when they are lying incapacitated, unable to read or listen to music or watch TV? Not much; I can tell you firsthand. You lie there and focus on a spot on the ceiling until you fall asleep. You notice all the details in the room: the cracked line where the paint meets the molding on the ceiling, the flaked paint around the unfinished door, the curtain that doesn’t quite hang straight. You just stare at these details and let your mind go blank until you don’t even see the thing you are staring at.

You leave the world behind and cringe at the sound of life beyond your window – people slamming car doors and driving off to their destinations, the mailman filling your mailbox and slamming the lid down. The worst sound of all is the telephone ringing because it cracks a hole in the comfortable silent cocoon you have wrapped around yourself and trys to yank you out by your hair.

Nothing matters at all when you feel so sick that you can’t even sip water from a straw without the accompanying ripple of nausea. And the familiar twinge telling you that you must walk to the bathroom now! makes you break out in a sweat. And making that trip with your head spinning upside down, like the worst roller coaster ride you ever had, eats up all of your energy for the entire day.

You forget about the work you are missing that day. You don’t care that the boss may be annoyed that you missed the important meeting and didn’t take the calls from the office. You know everyone is thinking, no one get’s that sick that they can’t even answer their e-mails! Everything that was so urgent and important yesterday seems like silly nonsense today.

You don’t think about the trips you never took or the career path you should have gone down. You forget the important appointments you missed and the chances you passed up. You don’t care that you haven’t taken a shower and your hair is dirty and there may be hairs growing out of your chin that no one should ever see.

I will tell you what did matter as I started feeling better that day. When I awoke from a long sleep and sat up to realize that my head was no longer spinning, I became aware that my mother was still in the room. She had been there with me all day, silent and napping in the recliner beside me when I was sleeping, jumping up to help me walk to the bathroom several times, then hovering outside the bathroom door asking, are you alright in there?

This is what really matters: To have people who care for you and love you when you are at your lowest point. To have someone sit beside you all day and have the energy of their concern and love and prayers be the healing energy that pulls you back from the edge and drags you back to life. You can’t buy that kind of love. No promotion, no vacation, no thrill, no amount of money matters as much. To feel that kind of love is to have everything you need on this earth and to know that that is all that really matters.