Lenore

Daily Meditation #356–2/15/2023

Illness can rob us. Ruin us. Suck away the very soul of who we are. Let it serve as an invitation to LIVE.

Today I had quite a jarring experience.

There was a woman I used to work with — we will call her Lenore.

Lenore was a kindly, older woman, nearly pensioner aged. She had a great sense of humor, a gentle face worn with plenty of smile lines, and was, for lack of a better word, motherly and affectionate.

I hadn’t seen Lenore in probably, oh, five years — maybe more. But today, today I had to do a triple take when I saw her.

She had once been a larger woman — tall but also of a heavier frame. Today, she was maybe half the weight. Skin hung at her jowls and arms and her clothes were ill-fitted.

Her face, once cracked like beautiful, old plaster with those smile lines and crow’s feet was now sunken in like a skull covered in pale wax.

The once motherly grace she carried herself with was now wracked with apoplectic jerking motions, her own body seizing and wriggling beyond her control, as if her very skeleton was fighting to escape her.

I don’t know what had occurred, but, a great, violent illness had obviously come down like some vicious wind out of the heavens, ripping the very essence of her out, leaving Lenore, instead, with a shade of death itself.

She was no longer fully Lenore.
She is dying.

— — —

There is only a small lesson — a morsel to consider, here.
Live life well.

Work hard.
Love intensely.
Take good care of yourself.

Be conscientious of your fragile existence and vessel — your very biology can turn against you and kill you.

Some of us die young — accidents, addictions, or worse.
Some of us live to be quite old, going in our sleep but decades full behind us.
But others, we die addled with illnesses we wouldn’t wish on our very enemies.

Remember death. Always.
Live life, fully.

Follow for daily philosophical meditations.

These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”