I COULD DIE TODAY
I have to admit, I could not understand what this exercise is about. And so I didn’t practice it faithfully. J At first, I thought, is this so that I could be reminded of my own mortality?
When I did pick an activity, it was taking a bath. Because this is one thing I do everyday, even when I have a fever. The only time I can remember not taking a full bath for 2 consecutive days was when I had chicken pox. It’s not because I obsess about cleanliness, because I don’t follow a fixed time for bathing, in fact, I used to stay in bed for more than half a day, but eventually, I take a bath, even if it’s late. I’m not sure, but it’s probably because I love the water and swimming. I don’t really want to understand it though. It just feels good.
If I were to die today, I will be okay. I will think of my family and best friends and how blessed I am with them. I will be thinking of long road trips with my family and the rain is spattering against the car window, and we’re either singing or quarreling with my brother about the music, laughing, huddling in the back with my aunt when she’s telling a horror story and the road is very dark. So many dreams—my parents are healthy, my brother and aunt are home, my younger cousins becoming independent, and having new car that can fit in everyone! Away from my family, I dream of working with patients, teaching them, being fluent in sign language, writing a published paper, cheering for a swimming/tennis/softball team that I coach, and being in a big concertJ. Stuff I’d feel liberated from would be the waking up for school very early in the morning or cramming at dawn for exams—just the responsibility of waking up with so little sleep. Waking up at dawn is good, as long as I’ve slept enough...hehe.
I could die today. I can die after this being read. Wow. And by then, I’d have lived having Plan As and rolling with Plan Bs (which many times turned out to mean Plan Better). I can die joyful because I am working for my dream-studying to help people heal themselves. Not a lot of people are given that choice. School is very hard, but I try not to attach my self esteem to my grade and remember my meanings. Although I do anticipate my meanings will be challenged more, it is life, and if I encounter them, it means I am living, and I can die because I have lived. And challenges are exciting! Like when I went cliff diving, it was so scary to view the sea below and that I could not come up again—drown, and that no one else was in sea at that time to watch me, and that the shore was far and I could have cramps on the swim back, so many scary possibilities—but I jumped anyway! After about half an hour of contemplating the jump. Jumping from the cliff was a challenge I gave myself, it was something I faced alone, and it is partly because of that challenge and the other challenges I’ve overcome, that I could die assured that I’ve embraced life fully even when much of doesn’t make sense. J
From a beautiful book I read, it is said that in medicine, much of our training deals with preserving life and fighting death—that our success is usually measured on those two terms. So we study very hard to be ‘successful’ in fighting death which requires us to be “objective professionals” and detached; but in the process, we lose meaning. Yet what I think is weird about this is that we all know death is inevitable, but we don’t really study nor prepare for death, and instead avoid it. I don’t remember where I heard this, but I was told that because I will soon deal with the deaths of our clients, it is important that first I know my own feelings towards death, especially my own. Is this why we are made to do this paper? J In that book written by a physician-cancer therapist, there are a lot of stories about life, loss, death, grieving, and their meanings; and it actually tries to present a different attitude towards death, especially in the context of wholeness of the dying and even the physician. There’s this thing one doctor said about the death of a young AIDS patient who was hostile and bitter towards the doctor in his last days. The doctor, being interrupted from sleep and on the way to the hospital to pronounce the death at dawn, suddenly looked up at the night sky and surprised and awed by the stars and darkness, felt some kind of peace. Though brief, he took this as a kind of gift from the AIDS patient—a sacred moment from him. His colleague put it this way, “Perhaps at the moment of death there is a reclaiming of wholeness…and that wholeness may pass very close to us.” (From “Remembering the Sacred” in Kitchen Table Wisdom: Stories that Heal by Rachel Remen MD)
LSC
Medicine 2-B
Labels: 2ndyear, cliffdiving, home, meanings, medicine, today
