My wife's aunt died this past weekend. She was diagnosed with lung cancer in February and succumbed Friday afternoon. She is survived by her husband and 2 children. She never smoked.
She was 39. I'll say that again. She was 39.
We buried her today and Randy (her husband - my wife's uncle) asked me, along with several of his other nephews, to be pallbearers. It was odd but not uncomfortably so. The more I sat there during mass (I'm not Catholic but my wife's family is) the more I began to wonder why this happens. I choked back tears for this person whom I'd hardly gotten the chance to know, sad about the injustice of it all. The priest said that God called her home. What? Why? How can taking a woman in the prime of her life away from her husband and children be "part of God's cosmic plan"? This is something we are told to rationalise why it's okay that they died so young. The truth is they don't know either. I also hate it when people use that phrase "part of God's cosmic plan". These people are selling something. You should run away from them.
The truth of the matter is bad things happen to good people. There's no rhyme or reason to it. They just do. But it is, yet again, a reminder that we should live our lives to their absolute fullest savouring every possible moment and those people in our lives that help give them meaning.
1 comment:
First of all tell Andrea we're sorry for the loss to her and her family, and that our thoughts and prayers are with them all. I suppose I can relate to this on a couple of levels firstly being (as you well know) that my old man died when he was 35 and the priest spewed the same Catholic b.s. then too (great plan my foot!). After surviving two (what should have been fatal) heart attacks, diabetes (as a result of pancreatic failure), extreme hypertension, etc...tell me what the purpose was in taking the father away from a two-year-old boy. It makes absolutely no sense, and perhaps begins to make one question their faith in general when someone that young with that much to live for dies that way and at that age. As far as pallbearing, no, it's not the most pleasant experience, try it sometime when you're actually related to the person...I had to help carry my grandfather, grandmother, both my mom's brothers and her sister...all over the course of about 2 years. It's rough and regardless of who's died, sometimes it just takes the heart right out of you.
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