72 Hours and The Family You Choose

“She has about 72 hours left.  She’s mumbling about seeing Gene and John and her mom.  She’s comfortable.  She loved you and your family.  It’s been an honor to love her and care for her.  I’ll keep you up to date on any changes.”

I thanked “the voice” then began the process of notifying the rest of the family.

My “other mother,” Jimmie, is making her journey to the other side.  It’s between her and God now.

Jimmie has known me since I was a 10-year-old tomboy.  She is my mother’s best friend and has loved me like her own since the day she met me. I choose to believe I was the girl she never had.  The joke is that I was such a pain, it took two sets of parents to raise me.  Might be some truth to that but that’s a story for another day.

Jimmie Lord was always full of spunk.  Loved the outdoors and her two boys.  Raised the biggest gardens I had ever seen and somehow wrangled all the neighborhood kids into working the garden for the price of cookies and sweet tea.  She loved her pug, Sam, fiercely.  And had the coolest Belgium rabbit named Bugsy who ran throughout the house and garden.

Jimmie grew up in a dirt floor shack on a Texas oil field.  Her father beat her mother in drunken fits of rage and at age of eight, Jimmie took a baseball bat to her father, beat him soundly and sent him packing.  He never returned.

She and her mother survived through grit and hard work.  Jimmie put herself through college to learn chemistry.  She was smart and well read.  Jimmie married Gene, an engineer, who had stints with NASA and other large organizations that have impacted the science of our world.

The things I will remember most about Jimmie?  The way she says, “I love you” with a southern drawl and a bosomy hug.  Her southern cooking—AMAZING.  The friend she has been to my mother through all of the joys and sorrows of a lifetime.  The opportunities she gave my children to learn and grow when they would go stay with her in Texas.  Her moxie.  And of course many other silly memories.

Jimmie and Gene taught me about the “Family You Choose” and how important it is to your overall well-being and contentment with life.  I’ve moved many times in my life for various opportunities and it’s the Family I Choose that stays with me, wherever I go, forever in my heart.

This week I challenge you to take a moment and think about the Family You Choose—reach out to them.  Let them know how special they are to you.  There is something life giving about connecting with others who love us in spite of ourselves.  That kind of love is the real deal.