You can't just disappear on me
I was sitting in a meeting a few weeks back with one of my bosses, who happens to have Hodgkin's lymphoma. He was diagnosed shortly after my dad passed away and has been undergoing treatment and responding well. I mean no harm to him of course, and this is going to sound morbid, but as I sat there, I was imagining what it would be like to not have his presence at these meetings any longer. So yes, I was imagining him dying. I told you it was morbid, but this is where my thoughts go now.What I was really thinking about was: here is a person full of thoughts and ideas, and if he dies, all that knowledge and all those insights just go away. One minute you are a thinking, feeling, communicative creature, and the next, nothing. It scares me, honestly. Maybe it's the idea of legacy - that I want to be remembered, and I don't want to just disappear. The idea of disappearing, the fact of death, scares the crap out of me. We have family and friends that remember us sure, but for how many generations? Then what is left of us?
Many people have asked me why I am a vegetarian, and I think it is partly my inability to understand death and my belief that life is extraordinarily special.
This all made a lot more sense in my head...
posted by Biff @ 10:43 PM
1 Comments:
I think it made sense in your post, too - not just in your head. I've had a few struggles with the concept of death during this first year of medical school, so maybe I'm just used to the morbid line of thought. I would come home after spending four hours dissecting a human body, maybe with fingernail polish still on her fingers or with beautiful blue eyes - and then I would sleep that night with a hand on Luke's chest, and all I could think about would be all the structures and tissues and organs beneath that hand, all so similar to what I looked at in lab that day, the heart and the lungs, and how after you get through all that, there's just empty space, there's no real permanence to our bodies at all... Anyway, so yea, creepy, right? But it was a great opportunity for me to educate myself more on what different people beleive about heaven, and I'm at the point where I see it like this; all the good qualities and amazing ideas and thoughts of a person, they all seem good and amazing to me because, somewhere deep in my psyche or soul, they remind me of God, who is by definition the source of all goodness and amazingness. And if I get to heaven and meet God, one of the cool things will be seeing all those good and amazing things in Him, and be reminded of all those people I love, and see their true fulfillment in Him. So people's thoughts and goodness never go away - the true Source of all that goodness wasn't that person to begin with, but rather in my Heavenly Father. So every time I meet someone who amazes me, or when someone I love passes away, I should try and help that to motivate me to want to be in heaven with God even more. I dunno, I don't know what will bring you greater peace, and certainly didn't mean this to be so long, but I thought I'd share my thoughts. *hug*
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