Intro: Hello everyone! Welcome back to Childless not by Choice, where my mission is to recognize and speak to childless not by choice women and men around the world. Civilla Morgan here. I am spreading the great news that we can live a joyful, relevant, and fulfilled life, although we did not have the children we so wanted. I would also like to thank everyone who recognizes that we are not all living the same type of life. Welcome to episode 110! Questions or comments? Contact me at: Email: Info@civillamorgan.com                                               Or  Visit the website at www.childlessnotbychoice.net, look to the left on the home screen and click on the link below the telephone to leave me a voicemail. You have 90 seconds! Well, this is a special episode. I will do my very best to get through it without breaking down. You may wonder why I’m doing this while everything is so fresh, so raw, but I believe now is the time. I need to do this to move on. Bear with me.  So, here’s the thing: I got my first real job when I was 14 years old. It was a summer job helping build the set for a play that would be performed that summer by members of our community, including my school’s swim class teacher. The play was called Guys and Dolls. I could not begin to tell you much about the job or the summer, but I will always remember the tune to the title song of the play. I have found myself humming it from time to time over the years.   But I also remember one incident. My swimming teacher was apparently also a set designer. She was painting backdrops and I was positioning the backdrops. The only thing I remember her saying to me that summer was ‘ did you tell your parents?’ I responded ‘no.’ Within hours of my response to my teacher, and making my way home after work, I was confronted by my very upset parents, asking how I could not tell them such a thing. Ugh, she had told on me, and somehow, even at age 15, I knew she was doing the right thing, and probably also covering the school of any backlash and I totally got it. I don’t recall being mad at her. What did I not tell my parents? Well, some time near the end of the school year I had stayed after school for intramurals and was trying to be cool, jumping into the deep end of the pool knowing full well I could not swim. I nearly drowned. Someone had run and called the teacher that was covering intramurals that day. All I remember was feeling two really strong hands grab me from behind and pull me out of the pool, and my coughing embarrassingly on the pool deck. He was just in time too, because I had begun to run out of energy from flailing around, and had started to drift to the bottom of the pool. As a deeply shy and introverted 15-year-old, I wonder even now, if I had properly thanked those two teachers.  I hope so. That was the second time in my life I almost died. There was one previous incident when I was nine, and there would be one more when I was in my early 20’s. I’m wondering why I’m thinking about that long ago swimming pool event in particular. I’m not sure. Maybe because at that point in my life I believed my parents would be around forever? But of course, that is not the case for anyone. We all die don’t we? All of these years later, the last time I saw my sweet mom, my best friend in the whole wide world was the evening of Sunday, May 5th as I got her ready for bed. By the morning of May 6th, she had exited this world leaving behind chronic pain, and chronic illness. I miss her terribly. What breaks my heart the most is I did not have a chance to say goodbye. My heart aches for my dad as June 5th--a month to the day after she died--would have been their 54th wedding anniversary. They loved each other so. I watched them all my life, through the ups and downs, thick and thin, flat broke, and money in the bank. They stuck it out. We don’t see many couples sticking it out through thick and thin these days. We hear a lot of ‘I don’t love him or her anymore’, ‘we’ve falle