Last year I was at summer camp for my birthday and I got to make a great memory of borrowing kayaks and paddling around the bay while the evening mist crept around us. Everything except our brightly colored kayaks was gray and silent; the only sound was our paddles gently dipping into the water. Earlier in the day I had woken up and gone to work, not even remembering it was my birthday until two hours into the shift. I was eighteen – I could now smoke and vote and be an adult.
This year I went to church with my parents and listened to a sermon about how you can’t get into heaven just by giving away money. You have to have compassion and love for the people you give to, and you can’t feel that you are better than them. The speaker preached about how the mind and the body are not as separate as people would like to believe they are, and to witness this you only have to get sick.
The sermon tied so well in with what I just got back from doing. In life you have to deal with all of the things that have to do with the body – sickness, waste, hurt, as well as pleasure, health and sustenance. These things are not your soul or your mind, but they are tied inextricably in. The people who I worked with were bound in this life to bodies that were unlike our own. Some of these bodies seemed to trap the fully functioning minds, and others matched the minds inside. But the minds, however well functioning, could not be released from the bodies. The bodily functions still had to be dealt with.
We dealt with those functions for them, since many could not do it themselves. Compassion was key – with so little privacy and so little independence, what was left? There are so many kinds of wealth, and for us to give money would not have been enough. A dollar bill cannot lift a person or change a diaper, or more importantly, it cannot help them swim for the first time or make a bracelet. Compassion and a willingness to help, can.
So while I was at church, I spoke to many people. One of the few who I really talked and listened to was an elderly lady who has been battling cancer for a great deal of her life. Last summer her husband had died while I was at summer camp and I had not been able to attend the funeral. It was tough; he was an amazing guy. She told me about a laughter club that she had made with a bunch of other widows and widowers in our church. She told me about one woman who had died a few days ago who had been a part of the group and how it was so hard for her to do many things because of a stroke that took her control of her right hand and her speech. Her husband had passed away not a year before, and the loss had been really hard.
Why was this woman telling me these things? I still don’t have an answer to that question. But I know that to have her trust me with that information, even if she had told many other people, made me feel awfully grown up. I’m 19 years old – almost a twenty-something. I have not had much experience with death. Then again, this summer my girlfriend almost died, my grandmother’s housemate died, a well liked teacher from my high school died and a number of the older folks in the church died.
For all of those, I could not be there. That is the hardest part about death, and even life. When you can’t be there to experience those moments that make life special, when you are apart from those you love, and when you are not able to say goodbye, it is hard to understand, accept and let go. Even coming back home for the first time since college has been hard – I haven’t been able to be with the people I was so close to in high school and it has made me incredibly shy. I never used to be shy...
So until next year, until I am twenty, I will continue to try to unravel life’s mysteries, learn about myself, and most importantly, about the world around me.
-- JKS, Writer & Student
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