Something I Learned About Myself Today

3 years after my mother died from cancer, I'm still not okay with it. I wish she were around to see all her grandkids, to see me in grad school to see the wonderful women that her two girls are becoming. I try to put her death in perspective, like it happened for a reason, but I fail to see it directly. I try to think of her in a better place or at the least not suffering anymore and the only thing that's driving these bouts of depression and missing her is my own selfishness so I should just get the hell over it and move on. Okay...fine.

But then I think that it was a hellish end of her life. Emaciated and in constant pain using all of her strength just to be lucid. Why did it have to be like that? But isn't that the way most people die? Even in its most beautiful circumstances Death is horribly ugly...it's scary...Maybe there is a lesson learned in the suffering of death and dying, perhaps it is the greatest lesson to be learned and we can't learn it until that time comes. Perhaps it is my own inability to suffer that drives this questioning and this pain and if I would just accept suffering as a part of life, then I would get better.

I guess that leads me to my current conclusion about the purpose of suffering and dying. Suffering has no purpose unless we give it one. That is, if the suffering that I go through because my mother died from cancer without being able to see her grandchildren grow up has no effect upon my life then it has no purpose. I have not given it any. However if it drives me to visibly change my life as a result of that suffering then it has a purpose, because I have instilled it with a purpose. Otherwise, I'm not sure I can find a reason for all the suffering around me right now.

Death, as far as I can tell, could have two possible reasons. The first is, as I mentioned above, that death is the ultimate suffering and must have some ultimate lesson behind it, if we allow it to have that effect. Second is that death is really the biggest reminder that we are not God. In the Genesis story the only difference between the Divine and Humanity is initially that people didn't know the difference between good and evil. Once that knowledge was gained, God decided that the new difference would be that people would now have to face death. So dying reminds us that we are not the Divine. Perhaps that is the lesson to be learned from it, perhaps it is something else...I don't know.