My neighbor came to me the other day with sad news. His lovely professional wife was re-diagnosed with breast cancer after a first round of treatments and is undergoing a second round at home. From all that I am able to discern, they live clean healthy lives and there are no prior risk factors in her life for this sort of thing.
Why her? Serendipity is a crap shoot and if you play the game of life long enough she will come to call on each and every one of us. What are we to make of this and what must we do? I have been visited by tragedy many times before and am still here wondering why it was them and not me who bought the farm.
Well, a life is just that. An exercise in serendipity and none of us knows for certain when we will be visited. What must we do? Accept that when she calls, that is the life we had and must move out. We will take no more of the earth's resources and we will give back what we took. We should be pleased that we were given that much and made of it what we could.
How many cows died to feed me? How many chickens? How many pigs? How many heads of lettuce and celery and how many hectares of cereal grains were taken from bison to feed me? How many hectares of ungulate winter range were co-opted by the infrasturcture used to house and feed me? What did I do to repay them and repair my footprint? They all met with serendipity for me to live and when the time comes so must I. It is fair and fitting and part of the cycle of life and as natural as making babies.
We must accept that our job is to be born, live a life and die so that others can do the same. This is how the system of life on this planet works and we should be happy to function as normal creatures playing our respective roles. Dignity arises from acceptance of what life we have and of accepting when our time comes and being grateful to have had that.
We and her husband and her and I hope fervently that she recovers her health even when the odds are considerably reduced by recurrence events and it is certainly worth a try but if in the end, it fails, then our love and gratitude should provide us the dignity to see us through this mysterious wonderful gift called life.
Jormawankenobe
Copyright 2008 J. Jyrkkanen
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