Friday, November 09, 2012

Life After Peace Corps - Death


News reaches me from NY that a friend from my hiking club passed away few days ago of lung cancer.  I learned about her illness and visited her last month.  When I saw her nearly lifeless body in the hospital, it deeply saddened me.  She was unable to eat, to talk, to move or to look at me.  Her body was unbearablely thin.  A once energetic, healthy, full of promises woman turned into “vegetation”.   I spotted a small tear drop at the corner of her right eye.  I sensed her sorrow, despair and anger.  She was not willing to say goodbye to the life she used to live, and the world she used to know.   This unexpected illness devastated her.  “Why me?”  Perhaps, she was still struggling with the question and could not find peace with her destiny.

I once read:

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.
If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.
If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.
If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

If one can leave this world with such a lighthearted feeling, one has lived! 
We are ordinary mortal, but we can definitely live an extra ordinary life, and if we did, when time to depart, we should have nothing to recall, to regret or to desire. 

While most of my hiking friends are still mourning for her death, I quietly applaud for her new life. She is on her way to a new journey, a new place.   We celebrate birth, why not death?