One of the failings of social media is in its depiction of life as a perfectly airbrushed fairytale. An exaggerated highlight reel filtered beyond any semblance of real life. An escapist fantasy... Thankfully this blog has never been that. I’ve dutifully shied away from lacking all substance, this is after all a blog about coffee and faith...and well snacks.
But today the story I have to tell is deeply personal. It’s an ode to the fragility of human life...
Summer is usually a time of lighthearted shenanigans. The days get longer and the weather warmer sparking a deviation from stuffy routine. But for me, this summer was very different. It was the first time I’d seen both of my parents fall ill. For as long as I could remember they seemed invincible to me. But this summer they both required rushing to the ER and the experience was deeply unsettling, because for the first time I saw them as mortals and realized they wouldn’t live forever. It was as though they had aged overnight... And then the realization sank in, we were all slowly marching towards an inevitable end. None of us could escape the fate that our time on this earth was finite. Even with the promise of eternal life in God's kingdom losing a loved one, or pondering your own existence was something daunting.
Visiting my mom in the hospital was a sobering experience. The screams of the lady in the neighboring bed, the constant perfume of disinfectant and urine. The screams in general were something else. It seemed everyone was screaming, and it would filter into her shared room like a scene from a horror flick. It was entirely new to me. I don’t remember a time I'd been so viscerally afraid, aside for the summer of sixth grade that I spent at my grandfather’s bed side in a hospital in Taiwan as he battled leukemia. But I had the fearlessness that came with being a child who couldn't understand the magnitude of such things and this time it was my mom, and then it was my dad, and the fear was too close to home.
Their health has since improved, thank God. But in the last month I’ve wrestled with the concept of mortality in a way I’ve never before. I prayed harder than I’ve ever prayed. I even tried my hand at bargaining, “God, give me their illness...” My Emo side started listening to Death Cab's album Plans about growing older on repeat. Hoping to find some guidance in the lyrics of a song, “a place where we only say goodbye, as each descending peak on an LCD took you a little further away from me...”
Although physically alone as an only child, I came to learn I was never truly alone. Throughout my ordeal I felt God's presence more than ever. Sometimes you discover even if you can't feel his presence, or think He may have forsaken you, he finds a way to show you that He is always there.
It lead me to muse on the advent of medical science, hospitals and medicines, and MRI machines. All in the name of preserving something that from its very inception was meant to fail. “We are born, and then we live, and then we die”- to quote the Smiths. Are we rebelling against nature by fighting our own demise?
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