Always hoped that I'd be Aposotle
Knew that I would make it if I tried
Then when we retire we can write the Gospels
So they'll all talk about us when we die.
(Jesus Christ Superstar)
"What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal."
Been thinking way too much about death over the past two days. A co-worker's mother died, and she had to fly out to Ontario for the funeral. A elderly friend of the family fell down the stairs and broke her ankle, reminding that my grandparents and surrogate grandparents are not going to be around forever. And to top it off my current English project is to read the book
The Ash Garden by Dennis Bock and write responses to each of the sections. Seems easy enough except that the book is about the bombing of Hiroshima at the end of WWII, as seen through the eyes of a survivor, one of the scientists who helped to build the bomb, and his wife. So it isn't exactly a happy book. The part I was writing about last night, and then again today because my computer crashed and I lost last night's work, was talking about the hospitals just after the bombing, filled with victims and the survivors looking on.
The line that really caught me was, "
He’d watched this particular old man lean over two small children, one holding the other’s hand, and practically heard what he’d been thinking as he wiped the tears from his face – Why not me? I am the old one." The 'why me?' was what caught me. Who hasn't felt that before? I wrote and wrote, and then edited a bit, and this was what I ended with as my response to it.
***
I think that the most difficult part of dealing with death is that it is completely and totally undiscriminating. We have no control over who lives and who dies, and no way to reverse the choices made. Death doesn’t ask if we’re ready to leave this world, or if we’ve done all that set out to do. Death doesn’t compare person A to person B and choose the worst of the two. Death doesn’t take the elderly, the ill, or the useless. All Death does is see life and take it away. And it’s this randomness and chaos that we, as a society, are unable to deal with. We teach our children to plan and to schedule and that spontaneity has no place in the lives of the successful. We discourage rash choices, while encouraging logical, reasoned choices. And then Death comes along and, essentially, throws all our plans to Hell. It ignores our plans and does whatever it wants to. In a world where chaos is taboo, how are we meant to know how to deal with such crisises?
One of the most moving passages for me in this section was Anton talking about watching the survivors amongst the victims. He talks about the disabled, “the long-blind and the stone deaf,” staring down at the perfectly healthy bodies of the dead. He describes grandparents mourning their grandchildren as, “the very old [mourning] the very young from the place they no longer wanted to be, a place that had abandoned them, turned to particled dust and irradiated ash and exploded atoms.” Every person who has ever dealt with the loss of a loved one has asked, ‘Why me?’ We can’t help but to wonder why our seemingly insignificant lives continue while the lives of those smarter, stronger, better, and the such end.
Back in September, I watched three of my classmates buried because of a stupid car accident. They were the brightest of the bright, the smartest of the smart. They were kids who had never done anything wrong in their entire lives, and were planning to devote the rest of their lives to helping others. And suddenly, they were gone. And I sat wondering why I was still alive – me who had made countless mistakes, hurting the people around me constantly, and had no future to speak of. It was incomprehensible to me why I was allowed to continue while these incredibly loved and wonderful people were gone. And there was no answer. There was no reason to explain the logic behind the decision, because there was no logic. All that was left was grief, pain, and loss. As I watched the hundreds of people at the various funerals mourning I wished desperately that I could bring back their loved ones in exchange for my own life. But as we all know, such wishes are merely pipe dreams.
The survivors are left behind, whether or not they want to be, with no choice but to continue living. We are taught to shoulder the burden of grief and continue with our lives no matter what. I wonder if Anton will be able to do that. I seriously wonder if he will survive to the end of this book, or if his guilt, grief and regret will lead him to commit suicide. And I wonder if I wouldn’t hold it against him if he did....
