LIFE | LIFE LESSON | PARENTING

My First Struggle as a Kid Taught Me to Appreciate Dignified Death

Believe it or not, your children know your struggles

The headline doesn’t kick it in for me too. But I had a deep struggle as a child.

Now that I think of it, I might have appreciated dignified death if I knew what it was back then.

I know! It sounds crazy that a child would want to take out their own life. But I did give it so much thought.

Life started beautifully. I was born to a Mechanical Engineer and a businesswoman. It was always the vast mix of ideas that kept me rolling.

Intelligence lessons from dad helped me win at school, and risk-taking talks from mum enabled me to pierce through life like a hot knife in butter.

Blissful is an understatement to show how well organized it was and did I mention I have a little sister?

A typical second child who makes the first hate that he came first. Life was pretty smooth. But upon riding into my eighth birthday, I got a hard blow from life.

• An uppercut that ran my folks from a little middle class to way under the table.

Oh, it came with a jab too.

• One that was continuous and staggering with each contact with my dad.

Are storms natural in all marriages?

Are there any blissful marriages without challenges?

I do not mean fights between husbands and wives. But challenges that will shake their marriage to its root.

• I saw my folks make the craziest decisions.
• I watched them fight and relive their past.
• I heard them being called crazy and confused by people that are obviously confused.

They wore the same painful look for more than two years after my eighth birthday.

My fight with chronic typhoid and muscle paralysis had shaken them to the very last penny.

A mother’s love is unwavering, and a father’s worry is even scary

Getting married to the right woman or man is not a tactic for the good days, but for the bad days in marriage.

My struggle made me realize how women took challenges and how men do too. Maybe not all men and not all women.

I grew up in a much less developed country. So all hospital bills are funded personally.

These were the deaths of my dad (not literally). He soon lost his two supposed Uber Cars to this struggle at the time, a landed property, and who knows, thousands and more cash in the bank.

One particular day, a specific call from family friends made mum mad at him. He almost committed suicide on the roadside.

On the other side, mum took the superhero role.

• Appointments with the doctors were five times a week.
• All hospitals are at least 40km away from home.
• Sometimes it’s two or three appointments with the physiotherapist in a single day.

I watched her drop weight so much that my two little hands could fill the holes in her shoulder/chest.

Oh, now I feel teary!…😭😞

Children see farther than you know it

At this point, no day went by without me wishing I could be someone else. Even as a kid, I had already seen the struggles of life.

I already visited the hospital every single day for almost 700 days.

You might want to ask why?… Because I still had to go to school before the day ended.

Some days, I saw emergency rooms filled with accident victims at the hospital, with several injuries that should be censored from a child.

I knew there was progress in my paralysis. The Doctors predicted I should be back to normal in a few years’ time. My muscles will regain strength as I am still a child.

But during this time,

• They were days when I looked at my parents sleeping in awkward positions and just imagined I was giving them so much pain.
• They were days when I took a deep look at my younger sister to see how much childhood parental love she misses because of me.

If I could understand what it was at the time, there is no doubt that I might have appreciated dignified death.

It was only until few months before my 12th birthday that I regained 97% of my muscle movement and got back to normal.

Gratitudes to Lanu Pitan

My medium way of celebrating Christmas is to revive my ideas of the best articles I read in the year.

Lanu Pitan wrote this article about dignified death;

It’s a must-read✅. I am glad to have read it. It might not seem as much, but some folks could be forced by the struggles of life to think about doing it.

I wish to revive this wonderful article by Natalie