Something to be Grateful For

I found this quote below about a year ago but only today does it really strike me as so true and strangely calming. It comforts me knowing there is great truth behind this quote for me. Perhaps, this is a sign of my healing....

"I have found something new for which to be grateful. It's morbid, but I'm grateful that I will never have to look forward to the deaths of the two people I loved most. I will never again have to deal with low numbers or high numbers on monitors and oxygen tanks or brain scans and radiation and wheelchairs. This holiday, it sucks like hell that I don't have parents, but now there is this gift I'm newly ready to accept- the realization that I was so magically, desperately, ruby-red loved. There's an equisite power in that, like knowing every road. It's enough to last me a few hundred more holidays, behind trees or raw in the wide open. I'm the luckiest free girl in the world."
-Wish I knew where this was from but today I cannot remember at all.

If I remember correctly, the article that I took this quote from was about a woman in her mid-twenties who had recently lost her mother just months after her father had passed away. They had both been very ill with different types of cancer at the end of their lives and she was their primary caretaker. Losing them like that was as difficult as you can imagine but she also found peace as well in the end of it all. They were no longer suffering and she wouldn't have to visit them in hospitals anymore. Everyone's pain had essentially ended. In a sense, she could finally stop hurting and begin grieving and face the healing process.

While, this woman's situation and mine are very different, I can still understand where she is coming from. I will never have to face ever seeing my parents go through an ounce of what this woman did. My parents will never grow old or get sick. I never have to worry about one of them getting Alzeihmers or other awful diseases. They will forever stay the ages that they were when they died. Most importantly, they died together and were at a happy place in their lives and knew that my sister and I were embarking on wonderful things in our lives. Of course, none of this makes losing them any easier but like the woman said in the quote, "I'm grateful that I will never have to look forward to the deaths of the two people I loved most."