Warts and All

This time of year has many meanings for different people.  The days become shorter, the air becomes cooler, and hues of orange appear everywhere, especially on the east coast.  I have often wondered why Jillian’s favorite color was orange and her favorite time of the year was the fall.  She entered this world at the end of autumn around Thanksgiving (Nov 24^th) and exited at the beginning (Oct 3^rd) of the season. During her short life she experienced exactly 10 autumn seasons.   Is there some cosmic significance to that?  Was it predestined?  Should I make anything out of it, or am I just searching, as a parent who has lost a child, for some answers that don’t make sense.  I often contemplate whether things like this are worth spending time thinking about.  But there is a part of me that believes deep in my heart that there is indeed something special about them.  There is a scripture in the Bible that I have found to be interesting.  It describes Mary’s response when she heard all the amazing things the shepherds were saying about Jesus her newborn son:  “But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.”  There is something about this short passage that truly resonates with me in how I feel about many of the events of Jillian’s life and her death and how I hold all that I have been gifted with being Jillian’s dad.  There is so much that I will never understand, but one thing for sure is that she has certainly given me more than I was able to give her. And for that I am incredibly grateful. 

Whether I am able to come to understand everything, however, doesn’t preclude me from learning lessons from what I do know.  Perhaps the lesson to learn from Jillian’s love for the fall and the color orange and things like bats, snakes and Halloween, is to be sure to live our lives with a sense clarity and passion of who we are genuinely destined to be – without pretenses or even ambiguity– and to simply be true to ourselves. Imagine if everyone lived by out their lives with this mindset and perspective.  At the very least, we would create a society in which we would more readily accept each other ‘warts and all.”  It doesn’t surprise me then to think that one of Jillian’s favorite cartoon vignettes was one that actually included this phrase.  She would laugh heartily whenever we watched it or acted it out.  Was her response reflective of the feature being funny, or was she laughing at the bigger idea that people are too consumed with what other’s think about them and not with being genuine and true to themselves.  My hunch is that it was the latter.  So I guess if there was ever a time to just be ourselves (good and bad and everything in between) it would be during the fall on Halloween.  That makes it fairly easy to determine my costume for this year – I think I will make a concerted effort to just try to be myself. I think Jillian would really appreciate that.