Heroes I Keep Running Into

I was within a couple of hours of my hometown yesterday, so I went on down to attend the visitation for my stepmother's sisters's husband, gone at 80 after a two-year saga of various ailments.  His wife had taken such wonderful care of my stepmother, coming over to bathe her and spend time with her every couple of days all winter.  As we stood outside on the funeral home porch in the 100-degree humidity so that she could smoke a cigarette, she told me how all last winter she would get her husband organzied and settled in bed, tell him not to move, and then make the half-hour trip to my father's to care for her sister.  All those times she must have been terrified that her husband would try to get up and that she would return home to find that he had done terrible harm to himself, but she never let on.  She just kept moving back and forth between the two houses, giving baths and making meals.

Both parents of one of my daughter's best friends have recently been diagnosed with cancer.  His is a particularly aggressive form for a young man (yes, there are those of us who consider anyone younger than 60 to be quite young indeed) and hers has required two recent surgeries.  She has always been a woman with a tremendous sense of humor, and now her equally tremendous resevoir of courage is shining through her laughter.

Over at Just One Girl's Head Noise, Pamela is chronicling her newly joined battle with lung cancer.  She too has a deep well of humor, unflinching honesty, and just plain guts on her side.

Several other journalers, some of whom appear in my sidebar over there > track the ups-and-downs of the illnesses that they refuse to let consume their lives. 

And then there's my dad, who has lost two wives and a year-old son to accidents and one wife to cancer.  He's now working out his thoughts and feelings about the doctors whom he recognizes failed to impart some essential quality-of-life information to my stepmother. But he's also planning a September trip, visiting my 99-year old grandmother every few days, and growing these along the road by his mailbox:

Did you know that, over the course of the day, bougainville turn completely to face directly into the sun?  Seems that they know something important.