Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What's the hardest thing you've ever done?

If we’re fortunate enough to live a long life we’ll face a lot of “hard things”. The more we are open to love and compassion the more hard things we’ll have to face.

Finding my little brother dead was hard but breaking the news to mom and dad was a million times harder. Burying my wife’s lifelong best friend that was beaten to death by her boyfriend was a tough thing. Trying to help my mother in law deal with my father in law who had late stage Alzheimer’s was tough but nothing matched the pain of hearing him beg, plead and cry …promising to be “good” if we would let him go home the day we checked him into the finest memory care facility in the state. I still tear up when I remember the terrible fear and pain in his cries that he felt in those lucid moments. All I could do in that moment was to hug him and cry. We visited every weekend from 200 miles away until Covid ended that. He couldn’t return home because he kept wandering away from home and thought people were after him….his years of working for the “company” (CIA) seemed to be intertwined with his hallucinations.

I had to deal with some “hard things” working for the fire department. The prolonged torture and physical abuse that culminated in the murder of 2 year old Kayla still haunts me 30 years later. Little 4 year old Josh was riding with dad on his tractor when he slipped off and had his head crushed by the tractor tire was hard but seeing that dad so broken was immensely harder. All the child CPR’s (a lot of them “SIDS) were so eerily similar with the parents openly begging their child back to life and trying to bargain with God as we stuck tubes down their little throats and needles in their chubby arms while bagging and compressing knowing that we weren’t going to reverse the destiny that showed as a flatline on our monitor.

I can really identify with the line Kevin Costner said in Yellowstone…”it seems that life is just one long string of losing the things you love”.

It sure beats the alternative though because if this thread was “what’s the best things you’ve experienced” I wouldn’t have enough space for the wonderful life that I’ve been blessed with and I’ll continue to endure the hard things because there’s just too many good things to miss out on.