If tomorrow never comes

Life is so fragile! So many things we take for granted that can just get blown away with a sight. 

I love my job, I love getting in my white scrubs and walk down the hallway to my ward. I love the chances I get everyday to care for others, to help them out, to listen to them, to watch over them. I often hear that it must be tough being so close to suffering, despair, uncertainty, disease and death; and it is but it is also a blessing in so many ways.

Everyday I get to remember that life is a gift, that life is fragile, that all we know and all we are able to do can change for ever with the blink of an eye. A bicycle tour under the summer sky, a fall, a hit on the head, bleeding and there they lay, on dippers, unable to talk, unable to eat, asleep. A headache, an MRI and their devastating expiration date from some doctor they've never met. 

We all hear news like that from time to time, they make us think and then we go on with our lives like they were. The more analytic ones will think a day or two, the pragmatic ones may leave things ready just in case, the more empathetic ones shed a tear or two, the religious ones thank God for their lives and health... Nurses and doctors live with it, we learn to getting used to it, we learn to see that nothing in life is sure, that nobody can give us a prognosis, that nobody really knows when and how it will be over, but it is, it will be over one day, for all of us. Death is the only thing we know for sure will happen in our lives, and yet we don't seem to care.

I have changed a lot and even more since I see what I see every day. It's sure not easy to put a red rose between some cold hands, close their eyes forever, make them ready for their loved ones' goodbye. It becomes more natural but never neutral.

Today, after I've opened my big fat mouth and felt a little ashamed I started wondering why. Why do we obsess with hiding how we feel? Why do we try to avoid figuring out what our hearts are trying to say? Why are we so scared of feeling something? Why do we go through life so careful and so afraid? Why do we hide, why do we deny, why do we lie to others and ourselves? We get hurt anyway, we cry and we bounce and we are rejected and we are loved and unloved, and we hate and are hated, and we judge and get judged, and we win and we lose anyhow, all the time, every day. If we see beauty in someone, if we see warmth and light, why do we keep it for ourselves? Fear? We might be rejected and it will be painful, but what could that mean to the other? What if it helps them shine even more? What if it calms their pain? What if it helps them heal some old wound? What if it brings something good to the world? 

Why do we silence words of kindness and of love out of fear, out of shame? What if tomorrow never comes?