Every parent’s number one prayer

It’s not something we think about until it hits us between the eyes.  I was reminded by the death of a 34-year-old father who leaves behind a wife and a daughter too young to remember her dad.

This has caused me to reflect long and hard on the fragility of life.

For me, the gravity of such a shocking grief is how important it is for a parent to be known and be remembered.  Being a parent of three twenty-something daughters, I’m much more at peace dying when they’re adults than I am dying when my nine-year-old might struggle to know me in all adult fullness and therefore have the capacity to remember me.

I think every parent’s number one prayer is that they would keep their living relationship with their child for as long as possible—certainly to adulthood and then many years beyond.

I think of those people I know who had premature endings to their family relationships and it just speaks so much tragedy.  Children not having their parent survive into their thirties, forties, or fifties. Parents outliving their children.  And many machinations between.

Every parent’s number one prayer must simply be to survive.  A parent’s most unbearable thought is they would not survive to see fruition of their child’s potential.

Parents cannot control so many things in terms of their children—their choices and decisions, but also their health and on the rare occasion their survival.

But one thing that motivates parents most is to stick around, stay healthy, and survive; to see their young ones grow up and so their young ones can access their love, protection, and guidance.

When we think about how much stock we might place in our body image, body weight and shape, how much money we make, what cars we drive and what homes we live in, all these and so many more make a mockery of such finnicky thinking.  The real thing we ought to be focused on is being alive itself.

Life and staying alive is a luxury for some, whereas it’s something taken for granted by all too many of us.  We ought to be so very grateful that we live to breathe another day, to enjoy our young ones.

What a blessing it is to have received life over a lifetime, and for families to have enjoyed such longevity of family.  It can’t be taken for granted.