Death Comes To Us All
Love anything that lives- a person, a plant, a pet- and it will die. The price of love is pain. If someone is determined not to risk pain, then such person must do without many things: having children, getting married, the hope of ambition, friendship- all that makes life alive, meaningful and significant. A full life will be full of pain. But the only alternative is not to live fully or not to live at all.When we shy away from death, the ever-changing nature of things, we inevitably shy away from life.- The Road Less Travelled. It might be easy to put those words on our mind, to accept the inevitability of our mortality. To insinuate that we have to accept It. I had just seen a person who is really dying and the experience just shook me. My aunt died early morning on July 12. She died of cancer, breast cancer to be exact. But, she didn’t just die; she suffered, submitting herself to intense pain, agony, always asking for an end. Seeing her with her eyes closed but filled with tears you don’t need to ask the intensity of pain. But the most painful is knowing the end. Death. The chief and worst pain may not be in physical suffering but in ones knowing for certain that in a month, or day or that very moment, your body will just give up, leaving you helpless and submit yourself to it. The worst part of it is that, it is certain. You just started living for a moment, no more plans for the future, you can’t just hold even tomorrow. Your mind is empty. You cling only to hope for even sleep, which is your only escape slowly being taken from you. Things flashing in your mind like lightning, in black and white, just everything got no meaning anymore. You started to see apparitions, you can’t imagine how time became so still. Pain consumes you. Inside of you, The cancer, one of the wonders of the universe, replicate, making more copy of themselves, they just replicate, they never stop, they just keep on multiplying, spreading themselves, forever. In the early stage of her ordeal, I told her to visualize herself inside her body with a gun and one by one she will attack those cells killing them all. Power of the mind. That time, I know she can’t do it. I’m trying to give her hope when myself doesn’t have one. She sensed it. It’s a race, a race that can never be won. I always hear her crying, asking for help, begging, for even in the worst situation she still hope and cling on something which she only can understand. But as the cancer progresses, reaching her lungs doubling her suffering, she begs for death. Maybe, in some corner of her mind, she might have think to fight against it, maybe as the only alternative or maybe her faith. I pray at that time that she can have courage to face and courage for us to accept the inevitable. That she will just let go and follow her fate so as not to prolong her agony. So easy for me to say that. Only God embraces the cross. Do we have same courage as God? She’s crying out loud, begging for an end, sweep end. She might be certain, but it’s the uncertainty of when, that is heavier than death itself. So heavy that not even the phrase above can help ease the pain. Though I have some anxiety about it, I know even in death, she still believe, with the rosary always on her hand as a testimony of her faith, she died peacefully, and nobody can take her belief on salvation.