You have to learn to live with life

In recent months, the requirements imposed by COVID-19 have come to disrupt our interpersonal relationships by forcing us to question ourselves in a new way about life.

I have been prepared to do teleconfession to imitate my doctor who does telemedicine. With those who wonder about the mystery of the deadly COVID-19, I tell them that the great mystery is that of life and we must learn to live with life.

We know as little about life as we know about death. It is because life is unknown that the thought of death appears to be an abyss.

“When we don’t know what life is, how can we know what death is.” (Confucius, 551-479 BC)

We spend too much time running away and meeting intermittently. Without quite knowing who we are, we ignore others around us, occupied with material worries and entertainment. And now a loved one dies.

“It is in the face of the surprise of this death that we realize that life could have been otherwise”, a lady told me, whose husband committed suicide.

“In the cemetery, the survivors mourn those who are no longer alive,” another person told me.

And she added, telling me that “if we don’t know so little those with whom we live, it’s because we are closed like an oyster”.

Following the suicide of his son, a relative told me that all the difficulties of knowing his child in the depths of his soul, all these difficulties reappear before his death.

I read somewhere that it is not a question of whether we will be alive after death, but the important thing is to be alive before we die.

This character, death, nobody sees it. What we see is a dead person, a corpse.

In these times of pandemic, there is a certain brainwashing where one makes a great consumption of ideas which one hammers to make them instruments of massive blindness, in the manner of Donald Trump.

I repeat recklessly, the important thing is not to know what will happen after death, the important is what happens now and what we do with our life.

“Always, let’s avoid remaining on the surface of ourselves and move from the superficial to the essential, from the visible to the invisible,” a mother of two wrote to me following her divorce.

I end with a reflection from Doris Lussier, at the funeral of her own son.

“What I find beautiful in human destiny, despite its apparent cruelty, is that for me, to die is not to end, it is to continue differently. A human being who dies is not a mortal who ends, it is an immortal who begins. To die, deep down, is perhaps as beautiful as being born. Isn’t the setting sun as beautiful as the rising sun? A boat that arrives safely, isn’t that a happy event? And if being born is only a painful way to access the happiness of life, why shouldn’t dying be just a painful way of becoming happy? ”

Léon Robichaud, IVDei
Shippagan