What has been your most difficult year of life so far?

Question

......a year you'll always remember because of adversity, yet a year that perhaps taught you more about yourself than you learned at any other time.

Mine was age 30. I lost my mother that year. When you lose a parent, it is devastating. Not only do you realize how great your love was, you realize how much your parents loved you. So you go off in search for that same kind of love......but no other love will ever exist like the love of a parent for a child. So that same year, I got pregnant with my first child and found the love that surely my mom had felt for me.


So which year of your life devastated you.....while teaching you so much about yourself simultaneously?

Answer 1

Mine was 12 years ago. Lost my third child, my little girl. She was stillborn. I remember the delivery room and helping my wife through the experience of delivering a child we had just learned was dead. I kept thinking "Good God what an unholy nightmare this is." For people who have been through the tragedy of losing a child, you know what I mean.

A year and a half later my wife wanted out of the marriage. We struggled to save things for a while but it eventually came to an end after 18 years.

Learning the reality of this kind of tragedy will change you for life. You simply can't understand it until you experience it. Once you go through it, you wish you hadn't but realize you can never go back to the former state of ignorance where you lived all of your life.

Many other fabulous things happened that are on the other end of the spectrum. I don't know that I would love life so much now if I didn't know the depths of that despair. I learned the meaning of a great saying - sorrow hollows out the cup of life so that it may be filled with joy.

Answer 2

"...There's a new love that is born for each one that has died...as a child, I thought I could live with out pain- without sorrow... As a man I found it's all caught up with me- asleep yet so afraid..."

Mine too was age 30. When I felt I lost the only thing I had ever dreamed about- my family unity. Once I realized how "asleep" I was, that I had to wake up and fight for what was still there, that's when I realized that what I thought had died was really just a new beginning- a cycle of life- and I realized what was most important to me- a stronger posterity for generations to come- who was, is now, and always will be counting on me. Counting on me to face adversity and learn and grow from it so I can lead my children through this and teach them to lead theirs...

My life will never be the same. I've never been more "Awake"!

Answer 3

Well I guess when i am feeling sorry for myself and a bit selfish the year 2001 comes to mind,there wasnt suppose to be anymore after that year/ But in retrospect my worst year was also my best year it was a year when i got a chance to play a large role in my grandsons lives, My son and his wife were in a transitional stage, so I get a chance to actually raise these guys
at first this was out of neccesity, and I was somewhat leary of the prospect i mean everyday,And the youngest not even a month old yet..with my sons I was gone more than i was home much more due to the nature of my work, So now i have this opportunity, and wouldn't you know that short one he just grew and grew and grew on me. So things are going great, we
even learn how to walk, listen to music, have food fights,
we do it all, then from out of nowhere a decision was made
to relocate for a new job,practically overnight, So they had to leave a different life, new job, and a different country as well
So yeah i would have never believed that would be my best
and now that there gone for what I know will be years,
thats now my worst, to go from best to worst in the same year,2006
What did it teach me,, more than I will ever learn in 11 months
ever again about myself and what means the most to me.
thanks for asking

Answer 4

This has been a pretty tough year for me. My relationship has always been hit and miss with my mom - I was raised by my dad who is a gentle, kind and loving spirited person. Although I didn't live with my mom, we always remained somewhat friendly. But she would often ignore my phone calls and basically blew me off. Last year she became disabled to the point of no longer being able to work - rheumatoid arthritis, MS, diabetes, has had a stroke, etc. and I felt it was my duty to take care of her so I invited her into my home and took care of her. I set up doctors appts, cooked for her, looked after her...all the things that I should do as a daughter, but she didn't appreciate any of it and made me feel like nothing I was doing would ever be good enough. It didn't take long for me to feel like I was some 5 year old kid again and started to get depressed and began to hate life. I finally couldn't take it anymore - was to the point of losing my sanity and broke down and asked her to leave. It was the hardest thing I've ever done...kicking out my disabled mother. What kind of horrible rotten person am I?!? I still beat myself up daily over it. We aren't speaking. She's basically erased me from her life and I guess I've done the same. I don't feel like I've done anything wrong and shouldn't have to go begging for forgiveness with my tail between my legs, but this is how it is with her. She is dying. I know this and many nights I lay awake wondering what to do. I have learned that I have black spot on my soul :(

Answer 5

It was the year Angelina Jolie dumped me for that Brad Pitt guy. It took me awhile to bounce back. The year after I finished college my dad died of colon cancer two days after Christmas. I watched him die a slow agonizing death. He was so frail when the doctors sent him home for the last ten days that I hardly recognized him as the man who had taken me camping and fishing as a boy. It was a year when I was out of college, but had not found real job. My girlfriend would drop me subtle hints like giving me books to read(What Color Is Your Parachute?) and other ideas to get my career on track. Armed only with an English degree the world was not beating a path to my door. We broke up not too long afterwards and I went to graduate school and earned my teaching credential. It seemed like a long year. Losing a parent is one of the hardest things in life. I suppose only the loss of a spouse or child can equal it.

Answer 6

There's a saying in my family.
"No matter what this year brings, it takes us further from nineteen ninety pigging-five."

It's quite a recent saying really...

1995. I was 24/25, and utterly unaware of what was important.

My grandmother, who had raised me while dad was drunk and ma was working, had a massive stroke in our house on Christmas Day 1994. So 1995 was a year of hospitals, homes, the stench of community care, the wrong nightdresses, spectacles down the side of the couch. A year of being someone else someone who lived in the 1920s, and of painkillers and antidepressants to keep at bay the screams she still had in her of betrayal and pain. And finally...finally, peace, closed eyes, extinction. I learned what strength really was that year, and that it's not always a blessing.

I'd finished writing my first book in 1994 too, had been shopping it around and got HarperCollins interested. Throughout 1995, they vacillated, requested changes, rewrites and amendments, and finally dropped it. The book was my plan for life, as I wasn't sure I enjoyed anything else enough to make a living doing it. The year taught me that sometimes, confidence and cleverness aren't enough, and you have to experience disappointment, failure, rage. If nothing else, they give you something else to write about.

Meanwhile, with all the trips home from college to my grandmother, I was rapidly failing my final year of college. When the book was rejected, the truth slammed into me that I was going to have to get a job. I duly called the college as soon as the results should have been out. They weren't. I called every day for a week, getting more and more persistent. Finally, I demanded to talk to my personal tutor. He was frustated having to deal with me, and finally told me what no-one else had. I had failed. Alone of all the students in my year, I had failed. Lectures followed from the family about the disappointment they felt.

That year I lost my rudder and my course. Learned my own weakness, my own vulnerability to failure. The ultimate lesson of the year though was that time's a-wastin' - you either do something with it while you have it, or you do nothing and look back at emptiness. I went into a kind of systemic shock in 1995, that wouldn't be resolved until 1997. I followed it with a year of living at home with my parents, age 25, having failed at everything I'd tried. My inordinate pride wouldn't fly any more, and I took whatever job was offered - factory work and grocery store clerking. Mr Bigshot Writer came down to earth, stopped swanning about like he was better than everyone, and faced the prospect of becoming another might-have-been life. It was numbing, terrible, and I lived in a cocoon until the events of 1997 set me free.

But that's another story...;o)

Answer 7

My first year was terrible...all that screaming that haunted my sleep: the caring hands that tended to me, helping through those harrowing times...

I tried to communicate with my parents and the help, but alas, they could not understand my cries: honestly, I vividly remember the difference in my intonation and volumes for "I done a poo, clean me up I smell" and "what the bloody hell was that big noisy thing doing scaring me like that" [which was the same cry for either the TV, the maid or indeed my cuddly toy when it fell on me)...but they did not seem to understand

I am amazed I grew up into such a well-rounded figure type pillar of the community thing like wot I have, arn't you.

Answer 8

Mine was age 35 I got divorced after 19 years of marriage, turne out to be the best thing at age 37, I remarried the love of my life!

Answer 9

21 as I lost my mom that year, graduated Uni, got married and got my first job. We also bought our first flat that year so the world at the end of those 12 months was, for me a lot different to the one at the beginning.

Answer 10

As far as me, i guess, the days which are gone are always been difficult in a person's life.. no matter how much they have learned from it or how happy they were in gone days but some never come out of difficult times. They always remember them..