Vocal Point : Pain can make you realize what you’ve missed

In an effort to ignore the pain, I let my mind drift.

I thought about my father. If he had been more conscientious about visiting the doctor, would he be alive today? His habit was to avoid medical professionals until his needs were almost desperate. Could doctors have detected the aneurysm hiding in his brain? Could it have been repaired before it burst during my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary cruise to Alaska?

I thought about Gail (not her real name) and what she went through before she died. Her leukemia was a rare, hard-to-treat type. With husband Bob (not his real name) alongside, Gail went through chemotherapy, transfusions, bone marrow biopsies and transplants, enduring more than a year and a half of pain, discomfort, baldness and other indignities I can’t begin to fathom.

Somehow, the sharp pain throbbing in my arm briefly connected us all together in the arc that is life.

I was undergoing a routine medical test, one of those the over-50 crowd needs to endure on a regular basis. The unexpected level of pain from the IV was a brief but jarring reminder of my own mortality.

A few months later I was cleaning up the backyard in preparation for winter when I realized it had been a banner year for blooms. But I knew that only from the dead flowers and stems left behind. Not only did I rarely venture out back this past spring and summer, during August I didn’t go there at all because I’d had someone else mow our lawns.

The realization of what I had missed was shocking.

During this year’s blooming season, the season of life, I had rarely taken the time to wander in the cool morning air and admire nature’s abundant gifts. Now summer was past and opportunity to glimpse nature’s glory was irrevocably lost.

Like many Americans, I’ve invested my life heavily in the pursuit of success and acquisition of possessions, leaving the real treasure of life – relationships – outside, where their beauty fades and withers away unseen.

But now, with a steady increase of niggling physical issues and the loss of loved ones, I’m beginning to worry that the best years of my life might already be gone, and the amount of time left to spend with my wife and others may be much shorter than I’d imagined.

Achievement and possessions have their place, but they can neither comfort us in times of sorrow nor share in our moments of joy. They may, at times, provide motivation, but in our desperate hours they can never provide counsel to navigate through life’s more complex thickets.

Relationships may take effort – even sacrifice – but the results last a lifetime and reach deep into our souls.

Life is both confounding in its intricacies and beguiling in its beauty. There are times when I catch a glimpse of its unfathomable complexities, and I am stunned. At other times its incredibly beautiful veneer of colors and textures produce an ineffable pleasure that takes my breath away.

For the next chapter of my life, I want to spend more time being stunned and out of breath.

That medical test I had went well; the pain was intense but thankfully brief. I know now that someday that may not be the case.

At best, all the genius of modern medicine can do is prolong life. The most we can expect is a delay of our final earthly moment and, with luck, have a decent quality of life until that time.

But the choice of how we spend our days is entirely in our hands.