"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends" - The holy gospel according to St. John, Chapter 15, verse 13
A couple that I'm good friends with have both been very sick recently, with Covid. The wife has some health issues, and so they had agreed she should be fully vaccinated and kept up to date - which she was. And of course, she was the one who first caught Covid and got sick. The husband got sick three days later, and both of them have been struggling with very serious illness for a couple of weeks.
I'm happy to report that both of them are finally overcoming Covid, but it was touch and go for both of them for an entire week. Anyway, this event brought home how very much each of us are on our own.
We are used to having a great deal of power over nature and our world, and being able to influence events. However, as much as I would have done anything to help my friends get well, nothing that I could do was going to affect the outcome. All I could do was be encouraging, and try not to be a nuisance as they suffered through their illness. Most times you cannot lay down your life for your friends.
Once you get sick, it's you and your immune system vs. whatever illness you are dealing with, and after a certain point, there isn't much that anyone else can do to help you get well. With Covid, you can get oxygen to help carry you through a period of fluid in your lungs. You can take anti-viral drugs or an antibiotic so that a secondary infection doesn't show up to finish you off. You can go to a hospital, so that they can clean out your life's savings before you die. Whether you live or die matters less to them than whether you can pay the bill.
At the end of the day though, we are each destined to die - most likely not at a time of our own choosing. For that reason, it's probably best to have accepted that fact ahead of time, and to be mentally prepared for it. A stoic (logic, reason) would absolutely not be concerned or fearful of death, and neither should a Christian (faith).
2 comments:
Nice post, as they usually are. I can relate to this one in particular. Very vividly remember going to sleep after a full day and waking up a week later in the hospital. Spent the week in a coma and during that time underwent brain surgery (craniotomy). I've no memory of anything at all during the time in a coma. Nothing. Went to sleep and woke up, and wasn't until someone finally told me what day it was and how long I was in the coma. This of course, after nurses kept asking if I knew what day/date it was. Doctors had to reconstruct my right eyebrow, and told me it took 200 stitches to close me up. Then there was dad standing at the foot of my hospital bed asking me the dumbest question imaginable...."how do you feel?". I would have had fun with that if I'd thought of it at the time, but simply had a few other more important things on my mind. Have put a lot of thought into the part of going to sleep in the back seat of a car and waking up a week later. Seemed like no time at all had passed. From a Christian perspective, I anticipate that's what it will be like when I die and hopefully raised up to meet Him.
That's a life-shattering event, and it's a difficult one to even comprehend. Not having experienced anything like that, it's tough to imagine finding myself in those circumstances - especially at such a young age.
I would imagine it made you confront your own mortality when most of us were still mainly concerned frivolous shit - like about what people thought about us. Some never make it out of that thought pattern, so you probably have an advantage over them :)
I'm glad you have faith, which I share. Faith is not something I like to make a huge deal of, because I find it unseemly to push that aspect of my life. I prefer to just share a bit of what I know, to entertain and so that hopefully others can avoid some of my mistakes.
Occasionally I post about our weird political/social environment. I barely recognize the country that I grew up in - or maybe I was just naive back then :) I do remember a time when the press held all politicians to account, regardless of the letter (R or D) behind their names!
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