Facing our mortality is probably the most difficult thing for people to deal with. We all know it’s inevitable, but that doesn’t make it any easier. It’s even worse when you’re dying at an unnaturally fast rate because your body isn’t functioning the way it should to maintain your health. (I don’t believe in saying because you’re dying because, well, we all are, in a way.) The younger you are, the further thoughts of death are from your mind, until a tragedy strikes that reminds us all that we aren’t as immune to death as feel we are in youth. Diseases that strike in children are more horrifying because we feel they didn’t get a fair chance at life. Then there are others that are borderline, if not outright torturous.
Imagine what it would be like to be in Charles Sabine’s shoes: you know that the most likely cause of your death will be a deadly and incurable disease, Huntington’s. On one extreme, you could fear the oncoming suffering and death and let it take over your life. Day to day, you wonder when it’s going to start taking over. And when it does, you worry yourself more with how quickly it will overcome you. On the other hand, you could take advantage of every moment and go do the things you’d always put off. You can embrace every experience and truly start living and being, not letting it consume you. There’s nothing quite like a brush with death or knowing you have a disease that will kill you to get people to make some drastic changes to their lives.
Last night my mom told to be careful when I’m driving and be particularly wary of big rigs. After all, it’s pretty obvious that my little car counts for nothing against one of those. It turns out she said this because one of our family friend’s daughters had somehow collided against one hard enough to spin her car around 180 degrees so that she was facing oncoming traffic. Perhaps she passed out or she somehow didn’t get her foot off the gas in time – either way, she was hit by an oncoming car and did not survive the impact. It makes me wonder how it must feel to die without ever know it was coming, or have it come so fast that you hadn’t even really registered what was going on. Is a life suddenly taken more tragic than one slowly robbed by debilitating disease? It’s hard to say.
On one end is death by disease that you can anticipate and on the other end is death by accident that comes on suddenly. Neither is very pleasant, but it happens all the time and it’s always a reminder of how fragile life can be. I’d call these unnatural deaths, but technically diseases are a thing of nature, are they not? To me, untimely deaths are ones in which you die before your parents. There’s a saying in Chinese about how white-haired people should not ever have to bury black-haired people (aka parents shouldn’t have to live to see the day their children die). I think that’s a pretty widely-accepted belief in cultures around the world.
Stories like those make me think about my own life and how it will end. Of course I imagine and assume that I will reach a decently old age and have at least two generations of progeny for it really becomes more of a reality, but you never know. I guess I don’t really think about it because it’s a scary prospect to have my life cut short so early, before I can do all the things I want to do in this world. Besides, it’s not really something I can control, so worrying about it all the time won’t do me much good. But I do think it’s good for us to keep in touch with our own mortalities, if it creates the motivation to do more with our lives. And perhaps one of the best ways to respect life is to live it, truly.
I am blessed with good health and good luck, and I plan on making every bit of that work for me. I’m going to leave an indelible mark on this world, so long as I can live out the course of a “normal” lifespan. Even if I don’t, at least I’ll have been working towards it.
