Why do Good People Get Sick and Die
Posted Under: conscious living, inspiration, religion
Why do some good and decent people become sick and die? I can’t begin to imagine the anguish of cancer or any other debilitating terminal disease; and I know that I would be scared if I was to become ill. I would be scared for the welfare of my family after I was gone. I think that most of us who have children feel the same way. People do heal in miraculous ways but many do not. Why is this?
The apparent paradox of bad things happening to good people has been debated and studied throughout the eons by religious scholars, philosophers and meta physicists alike, and an acceptable reason still escapes us. I suppose, “God only knows.” What is it that God knows? Perhaps, in God’s eyes, dieing is not such a bad thing; and maybe this is the reason good people die just as often as evil people do. When one contemplates it, how could death be anything but good? The life we live is as good and as beautiful as we choose it to be. In his epic poem, Paradise Lost, 17thcentury English poet John Milton said, “The mind is it’s own place, and in itself, can make Heaven of hell, and a hell of Heaven.” We decide what we think and feel. We decide if death, when it arrives for us, is to be feared or embraced. We can choose to know the unknown and decide that it will be wonderful. Dieing may be as simple as moving from one room to another.
Death cannot be evil, for it is the final part of living as we know it. We do not want to die before our time of course, but to fear a timely death may be un-neccessary. Of course we will be anxious, any life changing event will make us nervous, but we shouldn’t live in fear. Our culture is so afraid of death that we avoid even considering the notion altogether until the final hour is upon us. We just stick our head in the sand and dread the day, denying that it exists even though we know it is inevitable. Would it not make more sense to prepare for death throughout our lives?
It is probably the suffering that we fear more than the actual death. When most people are asked how they would like to die they invariably answer, “in my sleep.” This is the preferred answer; it allows us to avoid any suffering and also to avoid having others suffer through watching us die. Dieing in one’s sleep is neat and tidy, everyone goes to bed and in the morning life as we know it goes on, minus one dead person; everyone is spared the emotional anguish of watching someone die. I do not relish the idea of suffering, but if that is my path than I must travel that path. I think that I would prefer to die awake, holding my wife’s hand, rather than dieing alone in my sleep.
