A well-lived life...

 
 
What constitutes the well-lived life?  
 
 
What's the secret elixir?  
 
 
Is there one?  
 
 
Or many?  
 
 
Mayhap, the permutations are endless.  
 
 
Mayhap, what looks like living well to one won't appear so to another.  
 
 
In many ways, her life was a challenge, the loss of two babies: one stillborn, the other dying after being born because the doctor couldn't be bothered to leave his golf game for a colored woman (twas the deep South in the 1940s).  
 
 
The third daughter died much later, after a pitched battle for her life that was won and years of rehabilitation ~ a staunch determination and refusal to accept doctors' verdict that she would be a "vegetable" after a horrific car accident (all the while raising that daughter's infant daughter alongside). That car accident did not kill her. Twas the colon cancer against which my grandmother was helpless, not for lack of trying, though. Until the very bitter end, she refused to relinquish my mother commanding doctors and staff, her training as a registered nurse coming to the fore.  
 
 
Despite these tragedies and so very many more, my grandmother's life was well lived.  
 
 
Why?  
 
 
She loved.  
 
 
With every fiber of her being, she loved and it showed.  
 
 
I remember her saying to never become a nurse ~ she hated nursing. Mind, she became one during a time period when nurses were responsible for changing bed pans.  
 
 
I think twas more than that, though. Twas a certain callous disregard she saw that disillusioned her.  
 
 
Through WW II, her major was Teaching (and she'd have made an admirable one) ~ while in her final year, a nurse came to her college from the Front and spoke, impassioned, of how they needed nurses desperately.  
 
 
That day she went and changed her major to Nursing. Teaching lost one of its very best that day.  
 
 
Indubitably.  
 
 
I remember.  
My cousins remember.  
My daughter remembers  
 
 
Great-Grandma on the patio playing with the dollhouse and her and playing Pick-up-sticks  
 
 
Grandma on the floor playing with dolls and cars and trains and what-have-you  
 
 
Grandma playing jacks or dolls or inventing elaborate imaginary settings, us setting off on adventures in the backyard, trekking across parks, through wildernesses, exploring myriad places in books...  
 
 
Naught was better than a story read or told by grandma. No one could match her for expressiveness. She was fascinating, riveting, glorious!  
 
 
We begged for stories and she had them, oh did she ever! Her life was filled with so much.  
 
 
She'd been a missionary to Sierra Leone, West Africa so she'd seen animals we could only see in zoos or on TV with Jacques Cousteau and National Geographic.  
 
 
She shared them with us. She shared herself and she was the best gift of all.  
 
 
What constitutes a life well lived?  
 
 
Is there one secret elixir?  
 
 
Or many?  
 
 
Mayhap, the permutations are endless...