It’s confounding to think that something as simple as a 30-minute outpatient thumb surgery could result in something as dramatic as an anoxic brain injury. During the three weeks that my mom was in a coma on life support, I spent a lot of time in reflection and meditation.
The first week after the initial insult was spent at the Princeton ICU, near my childhood home. There, two people were allowed to visit per day. Once we transferred her to UPenn to get more specialized treatment in their Neuro ICU, only one family member was allowed to visit for a few hours per day, due to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions.
My older sister is a doctor, so she was much better suited to handle the medical jargon and nuances of the complex situation, so she spent about three-quarters of the days at the hospital. However, when it got too emotionally overwhelming, I relived her, so I could spend some time by my mom’s bedside.
Whenever she was whisked away for a CT scan or other tests, or I took a break from talking to her, I took time to further digest the situation. I would open the notes app on my phone and begin writing the immediate realizations and lessons I learned that day and throughout the situation.
These are the 9 lessons I learned during those harrowing weeks.
1. One of the only things that really matters is family – everything else is transitory. Jobs, friends, circumstances, can all come and go. But your family are the only ones that will always be there and care about you. You should work to heal any past wounds, whether your doing or not, and prioritize your family above all else always and forever. That is what’s really important in life.
2. Faith, Hope, and Positivity – you can never give up having it. It has the potential to change any and every situation. The power of that intense positive emotion and show of life force is unable to be ignored when driven forward in tandem with spiritual desire. You can never give it up. You have to maintain that resilience no matter the intensity or overwhelming force the opposing situation presents.
3. Patience and calmness – genuinely have patience and calm your mind to have control over your situations. The process takes time, nothing is instantaneous. Getting overly excited about any given circumstance typically provides no benefit, it will actually usually work to counter the needs of the situation.
4. Love really does always win in the end – take an important step inside to dissect and examine your emotional composition to see what incites the true feeling of love and compassion. Love matters. Tell the people you love that you love them whenever you have the chance. They need to hear it more often than you think.
5. Belief in Source Energy – go deeper into yourself and have faith. These things don’t happen overnight and Universal energy won’t work for you unless you genuinely trust in a higher sense of collective consciousness. It’s a road of reciprocity. Never give up that hope, belief, and faith in the higher vibrational energies and what is being done for a reason to teach and better ourselves for ultimate higher realization. The physical and material world is a delusion if we let it distract us from our true selves.
6. Feeling – The feeling you incite in others is who you truly are. Constantly send out those positive vibrations, the feeling of love, inclusion, caring, and kindness for all people. Make them feel your love. Make them feel at home when they are with you. Be a shimmering light for all, even those who have hurt you. And do everything with a smile, it changes how you view the task and how others view you. Radiate that bright and shining energy.
7. Gratefulness & Appreciation – thankfulness for what has been given to us, what we have, what we are able to enjoy; both tangible and intangible. In an instant, worldly circumstances can drastically change, mutating what we once thought was inevitable certainty. Practice mindfulness and gratefulness of all that has been so generously granted to us.
8. Communicate – no one can really read your mind/thoughts. Tell the people in your life what’s on your mind. Always be open and honest. Never leave a gripe unresolved, because you never know when you’re going to see that person again. Conduct yourself with honesty, calmness, and caring at all times. Empathy is the road less traveled but the one most rewarded.
9. Love yourself before you love someone else – if you can’t love yourself before you get into a relationship, how are you going to love yourself when you’re out of one, after you’ve been with that person for your entire life.
