Go with the flow: Elaine always tells her granddaughters to make the best of what life brings.
Transcript
Oh boy. The life lesson is that you’ve really never got your life figured out because , all of a sudden, you have—what is this saying that I’ve always lived by?…I know I’m going to forget it, but it’s about what you had planned. In order to live the life that you have planned, you have to give up those things because now, all of a sudden, you’ve got this in your life. So, to be rigid and say, “Oh, this is how I wanted it to be and now it isn’t,” you’re only going to fight the brick wall, right? So, you’ve got to bend, you’ve got to go with the flow. I always tell my granddaughters that you’ve got to go with the flow and life throws you this curve then make the best of it—make the best of it.
And for us, getting involved in our support group at first, I thought, “What are we doing here? These people don’t interest me. I’m, I don’t even want to see somebody who looks worse. I don’t want to see what happens with Parkinson’s.” Well that’s turned out to be a very silly attitude, because you are going to find out one way or another what happens with Parkinson’s. And how you deal with it is everything. It’s everything for your family. It’s everything for your friends. I firmly believe we still have the number of friends that we have because we do always try to be positive people, and people don’t hear us whining about what we do. Like people say, “I don’t know, I couldn’t do what you do Elaine.” And I say, “Well, I didn’t know I could do it till I was doing it.” So until you’re in that, why say you wouldn’t.
My daughter got cancer. Her little girls were 3 and 5 years old. Well, I was just so grateful that I was able to step up to the plate then and help her. I had people say, “Oh, I couldn’t do what you do.” Well, that’s silly. Of course you’re going to do it, or how could you deny your daughter help, how could you deny your husband help, or your mother, or your father, whoever you’re looking after? I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t.
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