A new view on life

My hospital Dana Farber has a department of spiritual care. It is supposed to provide services for patients with all types of belief systems. Christian patients, for example, can request a visit from a chaplain and maybe have a praying session together. Or maybe have the chaplain pray by themselves for the patient? I don’t know how Christians do prayers, because I am not one.

In fact, I don’t consider myself religious at all, even though I was raised Buddhist. But I did request to talk to a Buddhist chaplain, and my main motivation was to hear their view on death. I try to be agnostic about what comes after death, but I have always been leaning towards the idea that everything we are is contained within our brain, so when the brain shuts off, there is nothing that comes after. We don’t go to some special place as ourselves, nor do we reincarnate into some other self. There is just nothing.

Obviously, the chaplain has a different view on the matter. Our discussion went on for quite some time, during which she said a lot of deep philosophical things I couldn’t follow. But there was one thing that stuck with me. She said that in times of uncertainty and tragedy (read: ‘death’), you become your parents’ and loved ones’ teacher. Which, again, I didn’t quite understand.

Then, recently, a friend of mine came to visit, and talked about his aunt’s fight with cancer. Despite being told that she only had a few months left to live, she survived and is now living a healthy life at home. In an interesting coincidence, my friend said something very similar to the Buddhist chaplain. Through her battle with cancer, their aunt taught the family a lot of things. They all were closer to each other afterwards and were more open about their feelings. They started eating healthier, and even followed the aunt’s example and started juicing.

All this reminds me of another thing I’ve heard a lot of people say. Supposedly, after going through a serious illness, you get a whole new view on life. You start appreciating things you used to take for granted, and you’re clearer on what you want from life. It’s a transformation I think I’m yet to experience.

It certainly didn’t happen right after my stem cell transplant. I have said in another post that after coming home at the end of May, my life went back to normalcy. I was glad it did. I liked that I could return to work; do things at home I normally do that I couldn’t in the hospital; eat proper food. But even though the nurses called the day of my transplant my ‘second birthday’, I don’t think I ever felt like I was a new person afterwards. I looked at the upcoming nine months to a year as simply recovery time, not time to change my life to the better and live to the fullest. Never did I think that relapse would happen so soon.

Since the relapse, my body has been through one treatment after another. My mind has been focused on those treatments and their effects (and side effects), not deeper questions of life. Now that the outlook is bleaker than before and I’m just sitting in my hospital room recovering from the last treatment, I have started to contemplate about life more. Hence this blog, I guess.