Going out in a blaze of glory

My last post was written in response to an assignment on death and dying. We were supposed to reflect and write about our role as a physician in the face of death. I realized that my perspective on death was shaped dramatically by my experience with Grandma. In some ways, I'm still processing her passing. Unlike others who I have known and are no longer here, it feels like I could still go visit her. It doesn't feel like she's really gone.

Yet writing that still chokes me up and brings tears to my eyes in the midst of a crowded coffee shop.

I had another moment of self-realization today in our clinical medicine class. Our professors invited a lady with metastatic breast cancer to be a patient in front of the entire class. A psychiatrist interviewed her, demonstrating for us a proper psychiatric evaluation. She seemed perfectly healthy, but death loomed in her eminent future. It made me think of my own mortality and how I would respond to terminal illness.

My dad used to say if he ever knew he was on his way out, he'd just fly his airplane into the side of a mountain out in the wilderness. I tried to talk him out of it... no reason to waste a perfectly good airplane. He said I had a good point.

He did too, though. I don't want to languish. Faced with terminal illness, I would not want my last years/months/weeks spent in a hospital scraping for life. There are stories of terminal patients smuggling Bibles into closed countries, risking execution to bring good news to the oppressed. That's how I'd want to go out. I don't necessarily want to smuggle Bibles, but something along those lines would be sweet. Our ambitions for greatness aren't always out of pure motives, but somehow, there is a certain romance about giving your all, even if your all will soon be taken anyway.

I suppose it has something to do with this:

"Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends." - John 15:13