Having confronted death at a young and impressionable age, I’ve often wondered how it has shaped my views on life and death.  Added to that is my career in the medical field where one has to be more emotionally reserved about this event or one will be overwhelmed completely.

To those who know me well know that my father died when I was 13 from cancer.  He had developed this disease and let it go untreated until hope for a good outcome was past.  We always felt he was too stubborn to get the care earlier but perhaps he was just stuck in fear of what was to come and couldn’t bring himself to act sooner.  Or perhaps he wanted to die, “suicide by untreated terminal disease”?  I can never know his thoughts and reasoning on his decisions, nor the regrets or happy memories he had because he is not here to share them.  But something I’d forgotten in the years since then buried amongst the emotional pain I carried and the feeling of utter abandonment by him in dying early, was that through his illness he had wanted me to act as a nurse for him.  After his surgery to remove his tumor he wanted me to dress the wound, treat the hematomas under the skin even when qualified nurses and medical personnel were available to us.  He wanted me to go with to fetch him from the Cancer Clinic.  When I was sick with a cold he wanted to give me his medicated cough syrup to use as the cancer spread to his lungs.  In these ways I remember that he tried through actions to say the things I wanted to hear him say.

When I decided to further my education I decided to take job-specific training and I recall being in the facility’s office considering my career choices and I almost immediately selected that of Medical Office Assistant.  I knew it was a secure choice as we will always have doctors and therefore will always need assistants.  I had an interest in science in school but never enough to consider being a nurse or doctor.  In fact in school I had been dead set on being a librarian!  I didn’t want to go into animal medicine for though I love animals, I am too emotionally affected by them.  So working with humans seemed the logical choice.

Several years ago my grandpa suffered several health scares and my mother relied on me to be the decision maker.  She had always been strong through my father’s illness and death and it seemed to be that she was feeling unable to do it again as she faced her own father’s mortality.  But my years of working in the medical field and losing my own father early, I find I am able to face it more logically and realistically and with less high emotion than I do other areas of my life.  Maybe I appear cold, I don’t know.  It’s not that I feel no emotion, it’s just that I also feel that when the sick have passed they are no longer suffering and have been set free which makes me happy.  I believe in QUALITY of life over QUANTITY of life.  Unfortunately those who push for quantity of someone else’s life are being selfish.  I know that when my quality of life has deteriorated to a certain point then I will not want to continue living in this body but wish to be set free.

I know that when I die I don’t want a grand funeral.  After all, a funeral is for the living and though it appeals to my ego to speculate how many people would come and be sad at my death, I also figure that if they cared enough about me at all then they should be making every effort to enjoy me while I’m still alive!

But every time we lose someone from our lives our own worlds get a little worse … for a while.  We have to remember that it is only their bodies which are gone from us but that a part of them lives on inside of us.  We remember the lessons taught, the memories made and the chance to love each other.  You live as long as you are remembered.

Yesterday I attended the service for a friend’s mother at the United Church in Mission.  It was a touching tribute for someone I only met once or twice but who had clearly affected many lives.  I am usually an instant crier at funerals but this time I was not sad for the passing but felt an incredible joy at looking at the happy pictures of this lady and hearing the recounting of her life.  I felt tears  spring to my eyes but I smiled thinking of her, knowing of her many health issues which reminded me of my own grandmother and both of their constitutions of iron willpower to keep living until their physical bodies could no longer match that determination of will.  And it touched me greatly to see my friends whom I have known from Grade 8, who I have never seen shed a tear in all those years, with tears coursing down their faces at the loss of their friend as well.

And while I was sitting in the church waiting for the service to begin I remembered that this was the very church in which my own father’s funeral was held in 1987 and though I have been in the hall several times recently, I had no actual memory of being inside the church itself.  But I will now.