Loss

On my way out the door from work yesterday my boss mentioned a former colleague who had suddenly lost her husband.  To be honest, when I worked with this woman, I was indifferent about her, sometimes annoyed by her, but overall she was a nice enough person.
But for some reason I began to think about it more as I drove home.  I inquired my subconscious as to why I was feeling a welling of worry about this.  Granted, we've got the stress of trying to buy a new home right now, things haven't been fantastic at work (but that's education in Cali anyway, right?) and I've got a math test tonight that deals with matrices to my surprise, the Matrix is not just a movie.  (Big shout out to Cramer and his/her rule, btw).  So, like I said in a previous post, I've been compartmentalizing, I know it wasn't life bothering me, it was this event specifically and it finally clicked.  As we are human, we proclaim to serve our Lord, our community, our school, our job, our friends and family, but really, we are also born of human nature and serve the Id, or to put it more bluntly, we look out for ourselves and how things might affect us individually.
That's where this came back around for me, I wasn't so much grieving the loss of a man who I never met, but I was grieving the idea of what that might one day mean to me in my life.  See, this woman who lost her husband lost everything.  From what I understand he was the rock in her life, he was the financial supporter, the bill payer, the hand holder during a needle prick, the dog poop picker upper.  His goal was to be the protector of all things for his wife and now suddenly he was wiped away in one swift stroke.
It would be easy to insert my own life and fears here, but that was not really what I thought about.  Lisa and I have a nicely rooted 50/50 relationship.  As disparaging as it is to think about losing her (or her me) I know that we would both be able to function through the pain and loss and I actually owe a lot of that to Lisa.  But here, in this time, driving home, I was thinking about my parents and their path to mortality.
My mom has been battling low level health problems for a number of years, culminating in the reduction of her quality of breathing.  There have been, over the years, tests and re-tests resulting in some thought of what might be ailing her.  But just in recent weeks doctors have been comfortable to say that she is in the beginning stages of battling scleroderma.  I won't go to extravagent lengths to describe what it is, but it is an immuno-deficiency disease that usually takes one of two forms; it either attacks you internally or externally.  Externally, it tightens and hardens the skin, making things uncomfortable and sometime painful, but thankfully, it is a condition that one can live with for years upon years.  Internally, it goes after the organs and most typically will manifest itself by producing collagen in organs like the lungs or kidneys.  Obviously, this eventually leads to death as the organs will eventually fail.
And unfortunately, my mother seems to be afflicted with the internal form.  But on the upside, much like HIV and AIDS, one can live for a number of years with special diet and careful consideration for how they live their life.  But that scratching, worrying, building fear that was growing during that drive was for my father.
My mom has been that rock for my dad.  A brief history on them reads like this: high school sweethearts that bought into the American dream, got a house, had a single child and started to live happily ever after.  Where things get all Tales of Grimm-like is when my dad became addicted to alcohol and would change from the good Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde.  Years of verbal and borderline physical abuse lead to a break in our household.  My mom filed for divorce and moved to Seattle.  My dad finally hit rock bottom when he realized all that he lost.
He began a long road to recovery, one he still battles to this day.  But I can happily report that my mom took him back in and I was asked by my father to be the best man at their second wedding; a (hopefully no more than) once in a lifetime opportunity.  And this is exactly has me so apprehensive.  What happens if my mom passes before my dad?  She has been his life, his rock, his everything.
I worry that he won't be motivated to live for himself without her, but then I feel guilty wondering that because he has brought himself back from down such a deep hole, what's to say he wouldn't be able to draw upon that strength?  So am I not giving him enough credit?
No matter the problem, whether storms are on the horizon or not, I do know with clarity, what it means to appreciate all that I have in my life right now and all I can do is honor myself and my loved ones by taking full of advantage of that life in this moment. 
Is that living for the Id, or living for the loss?