My aunt will most likely pass away today. My father told me that, “At 8:30 A.M. EST tomorrow the doctors will turn off her ventilator. If her heart fails, she is a no-code. If she goes into convulsions they will start a morphine drip. She could go on for a few minutes, hours or days.” Most likely she will have some sort of withdrawal or convulsions, and then, slowly and peacefully, she will pass away.
It’s odd knowing what time someone will die. You sit in your office, doing your work, reading your web sites, knowing that with each passing minute another tick one someone’s life clock passes by.
I can only imagine what my cousins must be dealing with. My uncle Al passed on about six years ago. So, three boys in their thirties will have lost their mother and father within a decade of each other. It’s sad, but part of life.
I don’t know if it’s fate, destiny, coincidence, or whatever, but when certain events occur I find I seem to pick up on seemingly non-related mentioning of it that seem to surround me. Details that otherwise would pass by without notice. Yesterday in my car NPR had a story about someone passing away, who’s only fear was that they wouldn’t leave an impact on the world they leave behind. They were worried that not being remembered would make their life trivial, as if they never existed at all.
I’m not sure what my feelings are on an afterlife. I just feel there is so much more to this world (and by world I mean the all encompassing plain of existence, not specifically the planet Earth) that is beyond the concept and comprehension of our mind. I’m scared of death, just like most others, but I too fear that I will pass on without leaving a mark. Whether that mark be children, music, art, history, or what have you, something, something that will bind me to the place I lived and the life I had.
I think that’s why my mind can never settle down, why I’m always coming up with magical stories, things to write down, opinions to express; I’m worried about my own place in this world. Some people probably never find it themselves, and they die lonely desperate lives. I don’t want to be one of those people.
That’s what I think dreams are. Dreams are the ideas we think will help us feel like we matter, like somehow we made a difference on this world, to the lives around us, to history itself. It’s important to have dreams and ambitions, without them it would feel like a cog in the wheel of life is missing, and I just don’t think things would work the same way.
I hope my aunt passes away peacefully and that her sons can move on form this. Anticipation is the worst thing in the world because it never ends. Until the event happens you just constantly prepare yourself for it, and you can never beat anticipation, you can only beat the event itself.
Its 8:30 right now as I write this…and one more person moves on.
-Steve
