"The tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live." That's a quote by Norman Cousins.Cousins was a famous journalist and newspaper editor for more than three decades. You may know one of his more famous quotes: "Life is an adventure in forgiveness.
To tell you the truth, I could have easily written about either of these quotes. I'll stick with the first one, though. It is easy to understand. Death itself is not a tragedy. It is a part of life. In fact, death really isn't anything for the people it is happening to.. they are dead. The tragedy is usually for the people left living. My wife, for example, was a tragedy for me and my daughters. For her, it was just the end of her life. A tragic end of her life for us, but just a lack of existence for her. I can't say this for my daughters, but I know it holds true for me. A part of me died on the night that Sharon passed away. I held her for six hours while her life slowly ebbed away. Many thoughts went through my head that night. Thoughts I knew I would no longer be able to share with her. Her smile, her laugh, other things she did that I just took for granted. They would be there tomorrow. Until they weren't. I thought about those things... and others while I listened to the death rattle in her breathing. I thought of my daughters and how they would never learn things from her that were usually a right of passage for girls to learn from their mothers. How they wouldn't have an understanding female ear there to listen to their hopes and dreams as they grew, or to give them other types of womanly advice. I thought of plans Sharon and I had that were now never going to come to fruition. So yes, these things died within me on that night. But at the same time other things were born within me to take the place of those dying dreams. I redoubled my effort to make sure my girls always had someone to talk to... even though I was a man. I changed the path of my life to make sure I could remain at home to home school them and make sure they got the type of education that I wished I had gotten when I was younger. Like a Phoenix, new dreams sprang forth from the ashes of the old to replace the ones that die. So I guess in looking at the quote, he is right that some things will die inside us. But I think the real tragedy would be in not replacing those things that died with new dreams. Everyone dies. And we all at one point or another have some of our dreams shattered. The real tragedy would be in not replacing those dreams with something else you can live with.
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