My Dedication To My Late Mother, Audrey

When I was a teenager, my mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor; it was the source of her convulsions. She was a good woman with a strong will to live. The doctors at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, MN said that summer she would probably not make it through the fourth of July weekend. We made funeral arrangements with expectations for the worse; after all, the world's best doctors couldn't be wrong. They said even if by some miracle she would make it through that weekend, the longest she could possibly live would be two years. Well, she pulled through that weekend, in unimaginable pain, hardly able to breathe as her lungs constantly filled up with mucous and had to be emptied through a tube. Bedridden, unable to walk, speak, or eat solid food, she somehow kept on living. She slowly got better to the point where she could get around with assistance to stand and use a walker. She was verbally incoherent, yet I could see in her eyes that she consciously knew what was going on. Thirteen years later her suffering came to a peaceful end. Her spirit had defied the world's leading medical professionals, I loved her very much; she was beautiful. Ten years following her death my father died from lung cancer. He did not suffer as long, a few months, and I was not as close to him as I was my mother. My favorite uncle died from lung cancer a couple of years before my mother was diagnosed with the brain tumor. A Cousin of mine overcame Hodgkin’s disease, and I have a brother who got lupus. Cancer runs deep on both sides of my family, and everyone in my family but me smokes cigarettes.

I'm the black sheep, previously running marathons and now cycling because of extensive knee and hip injuries; I stay fit and healthy. I don't know how much heredity contributes to my family's history of cancer, or how much the smoking, poor diet, and sedentary lifestyle plays a role. I like to believe that attitude, one's mental outlook and choices mainly determine quality of life. There is no limit on the greatness, joy, beauty, and potential of the human spirit, which can seem to defy all physical logic. I feel deeply in my heart the love for my mother, the love for her giant spirit, the love for life in the highest sense of living, the love for benevolence, kindness, honor, dignity, and for all of humanity; this abstraction which cannot be formulated by any mathematics or measured with a slide-rule, this thing we call love, is the root of all happiness, and transcends all time and space. That is my inspiration. I'm 48 years old now and can out-ride and out-work most 20 year olds. It's all about the spirit and love in my soul that keeps me youthful. I've devoted myself to taking the highest path of virtue and in that sense will never grow old.

We all make a difference in the world, for the world is truly what we make it. I know someday the world will be made into a more peaceful, loving, and virtuous place, for there are many aspects and places within it that are already so. Love and happiness are as much a part of reality as anything else, which cannot be defied for reality is absolute. Anything that is not real does not exist; in fact, the only thing that is real, is everything.