The Purple Sash

The Purple Sash...

 

 

 

It’s a thin slip of silken material. It loops into a sash.

For the years that I knew him, it was a ritual that he carried out each Relay for Life day.

He would register.

Pick up his purple sash.

There was a reverence and a profound sense of thankfulness each time I watched him slip that purple sash over his head.

The purple sash declares the wearer as ‘Survivor’.

He was.

He survived- the diagnosis; that whiplash that left us reeling.
He survived- the multiple surgeries that left him scarred and alive.
He survived- the chemotherapy that came hand in hand with a mountain of difficulties.
He survived- the terminal prognosis and the grief that wrecked us.
He survived- the goodbyes that he set himself to say.

He survived.

Survive is a loaded word.

It has multiple meanings and each of them in their varied contexts belong here.

He survived in the face of looming mortality until the second he left the room and went to that distant shore.

Until he could survive no more- he survived.

Survive is a verb.

And one of the varied meanings of this doing word is to “remain alive after the death of (a particular person)’.

 

Sheldon is survived by us.

By the ones who will Relay for him tomorrow.
Sheldon is survived by his sons.

The steely determination that glints in the recesses of their eyes when they think about the scourge of cancer. That’s survival.

Sheldon is survived by the power of kindness.

Kindness in the mundane and in the exceptional.

Oh- my heart.

Oh- the emotion that lingers and presses and ebbs and flows when I think of that purple sash.

He won’t pick up a purple sash this year.

It’s left to us- we who survive him.

I will pick up my white sash tomorrow.

The ‘Carers’ sash.

And I will reverently, with a profound sense of thankfulness- slip it over my head.

The greatest privilege that I have experienced in my 37 years was to carry his children and deliver them into this life. To partner with him as parents and to give him the gift of being a father- a daddy. Oh- what an honour.

The second greatest privilege was to be the one who cared for him in those last, long, painfully raw days of his goodbye.

To be the one he whispered his last “I love you” to.

To be the one his eyes sought last before they closed a final time.

What a privilege.

What an honour to have cared for him.

Oh- my heart.

And to you- the brave and the resilient.

The scarred and the fighting.
The ones who will slip that purple sash over your head tomorrow.

I am in awe.

You are brilliance in action as you teach us how to keep walking. Through the diagnosis, the prognosis, the scars, the set backs, the celebrations, the medications…. Keep walking.

Keep walking.

Tomorrow night.

When it’s cold- and even rainy.

When it’s that moment just before dawn breaks and the birds start to rouse.

When it seems just too hard to walk another lap- then. Keep Walking.

Then- in those dark hours.. Keep walking.

That is what my survivor taught me.

No hour is too dark.

No night is too long.

Some glimmer of hope and kindness will always survive.

He is survived.