My friend’s dad just passed away this morning.

Life is fragile in this world. Without death there would be no birth, and without death there would be no progress. Death is but a part of life, and essential end to what is a glorious beginning, and death, in many ways, also serve to teach the rest about the sanctity of life.

I feel deeply saddened by my friend’s lost. It had been a long process. First it started out with cancer, and then cure, and then regression, and then the decay. I had expected the news, but when it came it took me by surprise. I could only barely imagine the pain he had to go through, to watch somebody he love wither and eventually die, to have to go on in life only with memories of him and to see the world around him collapse and change. I dare not imagine myself in his shoes but I can only hope that he has the strength to move on, to suffer the grieve and then set himself free from its shackles.

This reminded me of how change is the only constant in this world, and how procrastination and laziness when it comes to caring for another human being might turn out to be the ultimate regret you will have in life.

There are people not worth our attention and there are people worth dying for. Sometimes, we take life as granted. We take things we have for granted and we even take people as granted. And when we lose it, we lose it all and then we only learn how to treasure things. The irony is, it is lost by the time we learn the lesson. Do I want that to happen to me? To be too late to show that somebody I love my true feelings?

I know of people who hide their appreciation of others, saying it is their “nature” to not show affection or even gratitude. I have, foolishly too, sacrificed for such people, only to be left wondering if the both of us would have been better off if I had done nothing at all. These are the people that perhaps need to learn what it means to hold on to the present while it is still here. But then perhaps at times, for them to learn the lesson, it might already be too late.

Life is fragile. It really is.

And to my friend, my deepest condolences to you.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Philosophy, Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.