No reserve, no retreat, no regrets

By Jeff Becraft

This week, my Dad developed the beginnings of aspirated pneumonia. I was already planning on coming to see him, but that phone call caused me to leave a day earlier than I was planning. It was good I came up when I did – the very next day, we finally had to call 911; Dad’s blood pressure had dropped and he was very dehydrated. Even though our daughter Hannah tried, we could hardly get anything in him.  So last night, we were walking into the emergency room at about 10:30 pm.

While I was walking into the emergency room, I got a call from a friend. I couldn’t answer it at that point but I went back and listened to his message –the very sad news that a mutual friend had passed away.

That person was Eboni Ramm.

Eboni ran the poetry night for Youth Corps every single year during my 17 years there.  She had been on dialysis for years. In fact, one year something happened with a calendar conflict where her dialysis and it was going to be on the same night as when we were doing poetry night. She said, “I’ll get somebody else for you.” I said, “No, we’re moving the date.” So just a few days before our poetry night session, which was a big session in September, we called all the parents and said, “We’re moving it. We’re pushing it back a week and changing it to this day.” Eboni just had a unique and fluid style with the students, in which she got the train rolling down the tracks, and then she would get out of the way and be an encourager the rest of the evening.

It was a great example of how some sort of workshop ought to be run… not just up there, talking to the students and telling them about poetry and being creative and expressing their feelings. There were so many leadership principles that came out of poetry night: speaking in front of others, putting things into words, expressing something differently than you normally would, supporting one another. The whole principle of the 12th man (that will have to be another email to explain that one if you don’t know what I am referring to), etc. Eboni was a key person in the middle of all of that.

And Eboni was a friend. I will miss her.

Not only did I get that message last night, but I got a message from another friend that his daughter had gone into the ER and was then in ICU with sepsis. Earlier that day, I’d gotten an email from a friend that their daughter was in the hospital with bilateral pneumonia; over the last week, I got a notice from another friend who has been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of cancer. The list could go on and on. All this was happening at one time.

It’s just a reminder of how fragile life is.

A theme that I go back to quite often in the Friday emails is: what really is most important?

When things slip through our fingers and we can’t change that, what are we building our lives on? What’s the foundation of our lives? Because we will be continually facing changes, whether it’s the loss of someone, poor health, or a list of any number of things, what’s really most important in the midst of all that?

Not only that, if I’d known Eboni was going to pass away, I would have made sure I would have would have connected with her.

The reality is, we don’t know when the next loss is going to happen. And so, if there’s anything that we want to say to somebody or in any way we want to communicate love for them or appreciation for them, now’s the time to do it.

Dad is in a hospital room today and he is peacefully sleeping. He looks a lot better than he did last night. I even wondered last night if this was it. But even if it was, I have said everything I want to say to my Dad. In fact, on a regular basis, my brother and I both tell Dad everything we want to say to him – that we love him, he is a great Dad and Grandad, and we feel honored to be his sons. No reserve, no retreat, no regrets.

Jeff Becraft is the Director of Our Place of Hope and the Director Emeritus for Youth Corps and has dedicated much of his life to helping shift the vision of people’s lives. Our Place of Hope is a paradigm shift for people living with mental illness that encourages them to regain meaning, purpose, and hope for their lives. You can connect with Jeff at  [email protected].