Making Sense of Pain, Old Age & Death

His parents had both passed away recently, in quick succession. They were in their 90s. Their death, though not unexpected, given their age, had shaken him badly. They had been sickly, needing frequent hospitalisation for more than a decade. Their suffering seemed almost unbearable—for them, as well as for him. He had served them as best as he could, paying their hospital bills and the salary of a full-time nurse at home and spending much time with them, trying to keep them in good cheer. Tending to his parents had so consumed him that he had little time left for anything else. But he loved his parents dearly, and so, was willing to face any privation for their sake.

Now that his parents had gone, he felt a tremendous vacuum in his life. It seemed there was nothing and no one left for him to live for. The thought that death would definitely consume him, one day or the other, just as it had his parents, haunted him. In his mind he would trace a long line of his direct ancestors, starting from his parents, then moving to his grandparents, and so on up the generations, till he arrived at the first man and woman to appear on Earth—Adam and Eve. Every single person in that line, he would think, had died, and now, the next to die would be he! It felt really eerie!

Every now and then, images of his bedridden parents writhing in pain, sometimes unable to speak or eat and requiring constant attention, would fill his mind. He would tremble at the thought that one day, he might become an invalid like them, sick, bedridden and dependent on someone else even to go to the bathroom. He tried to keep his mind off such thoughts but they insisted on coming back with painful regularity.

He was in his late 60s now and he supposed he probably didn’t have many years left. ‘If my life is in any case going to end in death, what’s the point of carrying on with it now?’ he would often muse. If what awaited him before death finally overtook him was being sickly, bedridden and dependent on others, like his parents had been, then whatever might remain of his life seemed like sheer Hell. Why go through it all? he would often ask himself. How he wished his life would end at once! He could see no use of carrying on only to have to suffer the pangs of old age and then die.

One day, he shared his mind with a friend of his. ‘If what awaits me in a few years’ time is years of sickness and pain, followed by death, then I’d prefer if death snatches me away right now,’ he said to her.

His friend listened to him carefully. When he had finished, she said to him, ‘If death were the end of everything, then what you say might make some sense. It would have been absurd to continue living only to face sickness and pain and then die, being consumed by non-existence thereafter. But the fact is that death isn’t the final end to us. We—the soul—continues to live even after the death of the body. That fact alone makes it worth facing every privation, including sickness and old age, before death arrives and carries us into a new phase of our life.”

Over much of the rest of the day, his friend shared with him her knowledge of things like the soul, the purpose of life, salvation and God. Life was not meant to be a bed of roses, she explained. Challenges were an integral part of life and simply could not be avoided. Because many people did not have a proper understanding of the purpose of life and also the purpose of challenges in life, they sometimes found life meaningless, as he now did, she said.

She spoke, in quite some detail, about how life can be seen as a sort of examination. In order to qualify to enter the next grade, a school student has to appear for an examination—which can have tough and challenging questions, requiring the student to adequately prepare himself. He cannot be promoted to the next grade unless he goes through and passes the qualifying examination. In the same way, we human beings need to go through the examination of life—which includes the possibility of facing many tough and challenging situations and conditions, such as sickness and old age—in order to pass into the phase of life that comes after this present phase of our life on Earth gets over. Passing through this phase of life, facing and responding to all that it brings, is essential for us to move into the next phase of life, which comes after the death of the body. There is simply no other way, just as there is simply no other way for a student to be promoted to the next grade without having to appear for the qualifying examination.

He hadn’t heard of life being explained in this way before: this present life as an examination, a necessary phase that one had to pass through, no matter how tough it seemed at times, in order to enter the next phase of life. It really did seem to make sense, actually. He could now see how everything in a person’s life, even sickness and old age, made sense and had a role in the examination that they faced in order to qualify for entrance into the phase of life that followed the present one.

His friend guided him to some resources on the Internet that discussed the matter in more detail. Over the days, as he read some of this material, a clearer picture emerged in his mind about the meaning and purpose of life, of pain and suffering, of life, old age and death, and so on. No longer did life seem unfair or absurd. No longer did he think it a burden to be escaped from. In fact, he witnessed such a major shift in his attitude towards life that he decided that every moment that might remain of his life was too precious to be wasted on mourning and moaning. He knew that the way he used every moment that was left would crucially shape his eternity, determining how he fared in the examination of this present life that he had to pass through in order to enter the phase of life that follows after death.