Loss

Been a while, sorry about that.

Between bouts of self-pity about my own problems, I've been thinking a lot recently about what it is that makes someone who they are. Just what is it that's actually you? Not so long ago, someone very near to my heart suffered from a bad stroke (more specifically, a series of small ones). Since then, he has recovered greatly and regained much of what the stroke took from him. Needless to say, the human brain is an incredible device. But, really, it is precisely that incredible feat of design which brings me to wonder. If this brain, this intellect, is such a complex and integral part of us, what is left when you remove it?

I can remember going to visit him not long after the event. I was sitting with him in the cafeteria of some sort of a long-term-stay wing of a hospital. It was lunch hour and the dozen or so residents of this wing had gathered for what was as much of a pill-consumption session as it was a meal. The stark contrasts in the room became quickly apparent. All of the people sitting around the lunch table were somewhere between the ages of 60 and really old, and most possessed obvious ailments. As I sat near my friend helping him eat, a snowy-haired old woman sitting near him paused in the middle of her vitamin meal and said to him, "Oh... you must have had an accident." She said it as if she were talking, with a small measure of pity, to ailing child. For though he was well more advanced in years than myself, he was still a youngin' to these.

Life has a way of making you pause during these really important moments, as if it were saying, "Stop, and pay attention to this. This is important."

The old woman's words have since resonated greatly with me. The unfairness, the injustice, of the whole situation was just contemptuous. This wasn't supposed to be this way! I still wanted to play hockey with my friend, go way too fast down dirt bike trails, backpack through the local wilderness. But as I sat there helping him through the most basic of daily tasks, I was hit with the realization that those times were gone.

It sounds cruel to say, but I wondered at times if this was really the same person. Could he be? I had many memories of talking with him about philosophy, theology, even mathematics. And now he had trouble understanding what he was looking at on the television. Was this just a shell of the mind I once knew? Or did I ever really know his mind? Was it something else?

Science tells us that without our grey squishy stuff, there wouldn't be much more to us than a boney sack of transitory parts. And I think that's worth noting. If I were to somehow be injured such that I couldn't really think or understand any longer, I would be basically non-functional.

But, I would still be loved.

And that's at the heart of this turmoil. To see your friend have everything taken away only hurts so much because you still love him that much. And the simple facts of the situation would tell you that you have less of a reason to keep on loving, but it just doesn't work that way. The essence of love is that it keeps on loving even though it has no reason to. It's really the only thing of its kind. What would cause some to sacrifice for others if not love? What would drive a complete God to create us if not love? What would cause this terrifying and sudden pain if not love?

So I found myself sitting there, longing for the person I once knew but loving the person I know even more. I didn't make this mess and I certainly didn't make these rules, but life has a painfully real way of reminding you how important you make everything by risking love. If care is to invite the risk of loss, then loss must litter the path to life most full.

I feel like I should have some summarizing end here. But, I don't have anything. I'm at a sudden loss for words. I suppose it suffices to say that this is the way things are, and that it is truly better to have lost than to have never had. Maybe this whole love mess is what makes us more than the dirt we are made out of. We hurt, and therefore are.