LIFE'S TORMENTS LINKED TO CHOICES, ATTITUDES

I NEVER thought to question why my grandmother didn't get around well. She was, I guess, what you would call sedentary. My main memory is of her sitting in her recliner by the south wall with a window at her back.

There was a reason for it. She had bad varicose veins. But I was unaware of how bad they were until long after she died. The circulation in her legs was so restricted that she had open sores around her ankles that never healed. Her legs were bulky from the beige bandages that were always wrapped around them.A lot of this she kept to herself. Often, when we would visit on Sundays, she would lie down in her bedroom "to rest." Now, years later, a lot of things make sense - things that were never talked about, but were just accepted the way they were.

Grandma's awkward and painful suffering is a metaphor, as I look back on my own life, for a kind of suffering I, too, have experienced. Fortunately, this is a type of suffering that can be healed, or at least kept to a minimum, with proper treatment.

I refer to a problem affecting all of us at one time or another, since it is a part of being human and having emotions. It is the injury we incur when we are offended by others. Such damage is standard - very few people, if any, avoid it in the long run.

Unfortunately, some people feed on such injuries. They love the role of martyr and build their lives around the festering emotional sores of everyday. They thrive on the pain. It justifies their inflexibility.

Hopefully, we become concerned with our sores at a certain point and try to attend to them. But if the injured party persists in holding onto the pain, we tire, after a while, of their complaints of how others are to blame for their circumstances.

There have been a few such times in my own life. Looking back, my main regrets surround the times when I let the sores fester without treatment.

Often it is difficult to tell whether such wounds are caused by others or, are in fact, self-inflicted. After awhile, who cares? The only thing that matters is becoming accountable and getting on with life - confronting the slow demise of the soul.

I have seen families where something as simple as who won a game became inflated into permanent separation of brothers and sisters.

I have seen situations where parents will not attend the wedding of their own child if another of their children by whom they have been "hurt," might be there.

I have seen friends - kindred spirits with so much to share - go separate ways, never to share again, never to grow from the value of one another's strengths.