Gloria Ferris

This lesson was again learned from one of my parents.  This time my mother was the one who gave the lesson.  My mother had polio as a young child; hence, my concern about her health I mentioned in yesterday’s post. She had coped for many years with a metal plate in her leg and scoliosis of her spine.  Each year our church back home had a big Chicken Barbeque on Fourth of July.  Each year my mother baked many, many pies for this event.

When I was 24 my mother called me to make sure that I would be coming home for the holiday because she wanted my help in baking pies for the church picnic.  I said I would be there to help, and she said good because there were fewer women who had volunteered for pie baking.

Well, at 24, I was not the responsible, reliable, predictable person I am today, and as young daughters will do, I arrived late with a hangover.  My mother didn’t say a word.  She just threw the apron at me and told me to start slicing apples for her famous Dutch Apple pie.  We worked in silence for what seemed like an eternity to me until I finally broke the silence with this question “so, is your leg aching today or is it your back”?

She flew around to face me, and with that look that only a mother can give, she said through clenched teeth “I am in pain every day of my life. This is not about pain, but about giving.  I gave based on what you told me you would give to me—help.  Because you did not see my giving as a priority I may not be able to give what I said I would.  You give what you can and I do but because you did not give what you could I may be short my giving”.  There was little I could say, but I began to work a bit more efficiently and faster, and we were able to make good on my mom’s promise to the other church ladies.

When I laid in that hospital bed for days on end needing help to eat, to dress, to accomplish the most basic of needs there was little I could give.  What I could give was a smile and a thank you which I did often and freely.  It was easy to remember my mother’s axiom of “You give what you can based on what you can accomplish”.

My doctors, nurses, and caregivers told me when I left how much they had appreciated my smiles and “thank yous”. They mentioned that my family and friends never failed to thank them, too.  They told me it wasn’t necessary, but it was greatly appreciated.   Sometimes, a smile and thank you is enough for those who give to you.    

When Monica Robbins interviewed Tim and me a few weeks ago I mentioned that when I spoke at the October Stroke Conference I did three things related my experience,  and shared seven things I learned.  She immediately asked what were they? I of course drew a blank and could only relate five.  I have since found my notes and intend to relate them here over the next few days.

The first thing I learned was to Count My Blessings. Actually, I had learned that years ago when I was a small child, but over the years I had remembered to do it much less frequently. While I was in ICU the nurses would turn on the television for background noise. I don’t know if I listened to the dialogue from “White Christmas”or if I simply dreamed portions of one of my favorite Holiday Classics.

In any case, it reminded me of my father who taught me to “count my blessings”.  When I was much younger I was a “worrywart”.  I worried that my cousin who was in the Navy would get lost in the jungles of Panama, that my teacher would call on me and I wouldn’t know the answer soon enough, that my Dad would go to work one day and not come home again just like my Grandpa, that my mother would get very, very sick. The list was a mile long, and I would stare in the darkness long after the house was quiet with my spinning, worrying mind.

It was shortly after my seventh birthday when my dad walked me into a starlit pasture and told me that I needed to learn to count my blessings instead of chronicle my worries.  That night he showed me how to count on the people who loved me, to count on myself, to count on my strengths, to count on the thousands of stars in the sky. That night I fell asleep confident my blessings outweighed my worries. 

Fifty years later lying in a hospital bed with arms hooked up to too many IVs to count, with a machine to help me breathe,  it would have been easy to have a head spinning full of worries. What if I never walked again, what if I couldn’t use my left hand for eating and writing, what if this and what if that.  I could have spent my hours endlessly worrying, but instead I decided to count my blessings.  It worked. It helped me stay positive on the hardest of days and saw me through long, dark nights.

So just as Bing Crosby sang Irving Berlin’s words to Rosemary Clooney in the movie “White Christmas” so many years ago, I would tell you this Christmas ”when you are worried and cannot sleep try counting your blessings instead of sheep”. It worked for me.