Musings on mortality
The other day, I wrote about my primary reasons for blogging and the catharsis of writing. Not being much of an artist beyond my writing, I feel that my means of self-expression is limited to the meager words that I can crank out on my keyboard. My writing style is much like my personality: brief and to the point. I mean, why waste ten words to say something that I can express in five words?
My blogging is a way of expressing myself, but it seems that I fall flat in that regard in more ways that one.
The office in which I work keeps a TV tuned to CNN 24/7. Needless to say, there’s a lot of nothing that gets said on CNN. Sometimes, however, CNN will air a story that catches my eye. In this instance, it was a story on Anderson Cooper 360 about a young cancer patient who uses his blog to chronicle his battle against the deadly disease. The young man writes about his hopes, his fears, his experiences, and his life in a manner that lets his optimism shine through.
Reading through this young man’s blog served as a reminder that life is short, and that the simple pleasures of life are the ones we most often take for granted. The most simple of these pleasures is the belief that we will live long enough to see our dreams come to fruition; dreams of life, of love, of friends, of family, and of a death that will come as we lie peacefully in bed after a long and fullfilling life.
Intellectually, we all know that death seldom comes after we have lived out our lives to the fullest. Death often comes to us when we are not ready for it. For some, death comes quickly, whether through accident, through sudden illness, or through an act of malice. For others, it comes slowly, in a painfully drawn out illness which saps our strength and our vitality. A rare few people greet death having squeezed every joy and every experience from this life. Death comes when it will, and it doesn’t wait for us to fulfill our dreams.
Sometimes, though, we have time to prepare for the inevitable. This is often true in the case of a lengthy illness, such as cancer. Faced with imminent mortality, the little things we take for granted take on an entirely new significance. Our favorite foods taste better, the air is sweeter, and we take note of the special importance of those we love and who love us in return.
Many of us get bogged down in the trivial aspects of life. When we are so focused on the things of marginal importance, we begin to see life as a burden, and, in doing so, we fail to pay attention to the things that truly matter.
My sister passed away in April of 2006 after a short and brutal fight with metastasized breast cancer. As her end came and went, I realized that the simple pleasures of talking to her would be the one thing I would miss the most. I often wish that I could have talked her into keeping a journal of her tribulations. Maybe through her words, someone else could have found the solace they needed in order to cope with ongoing troubles and life experiences.
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One Response to “Musings on mortality”
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What you write here is very true; life is short.
I lost my mother to cancer nearly 6 months ago now, and her fight was about 2 years long. We knew for about 1 year that her illness was terminal – we prepared everything that could be prepared, made all practical arrangements that could be made and so forth. Severeal time we were told that “Now, it’s a matter of hours” and all those time she recovered – until the time she didn’t.
When the day came, that we realized that now it truly was a matter of hours, we were no longer able to communicate with her, she was just there. Even so, I knew without a doubt that she was ready for death. Her fight had been long and hard, she was ready to go home to God and be reunited with my father (who also died because of cancer, nearly 10 years ago).
What suprised me was that when she did die, I was suddenly filled with this panic-like feeling of not being ready. I had too made all preparations, practical arrangements and made peace with the fact that she would die. But being truly ready for it, I realized, was impossible.
I miss the conversations too. And how she smelled, it always made me feels safe.
Maybe this comment was a bit side-tracked, but I just wanted to say that at least there’s one person out here, reading your blog, because she enjoys reading the “every day blogs” of people she doesn’t know. And she likes how you write, you do it well.