Mothers Ought Not to Die Around Holidays

The following is a blog post from a neurologist in Florida who goes by River Doc. The man is not a Jesus follower, but he has a keen insight in to human nature and the process of life.

Holiday Dying

Happy Thanksgiving! Two people died. Neither one was a patient. One died Wednesday and one Thursday. They didn't realize, I suppose, that they were dying during a holiday. One person had a ten year old daughter, the other a fourteen year old daughter. It was Mothers of daughters that died. One had very malignant cancer throughout the bones which was discovered only a couple of months ago, and the other one had very severe liver failure. The liver failure mother died in surgery receiving a liver transplant. That's always so difficult, because people get very excited that there is finally a liver. There is a severe liver shortage (actually, there is a shortage of all organs for transplants) so people wait a long time for a liver. It means hope, not death during surgery.
I don't really like mothers dying. It's a difficult thing. It's hard to see the good in Mothers dying. Of course, we all die and we all know that.
It's hard to see the good in people dying at Thanksgiving holiday.

The greatest challenge that we face is the dying. There is only one way to react: be nice. If we can go to the funeral and say "I was the best friend that I could have been" then we can do no more. I see many people who are near death and they know it. Either they know because of their illness or they know because of their age. Those who report that they are "ready" are those who were nice. They did everything that could have been done to be nice to those who they met. Those who fear death, on the other hand, are those that were probably not as nice as possible. This is how we deal with our personal death. It's like that for the death of the others.

The part that has really no obvious solution is the empathy-suffering for the children. Now there are these two young girls without mothers. Of course, there's nothing that I can do for either one of them. I guess that if I could be nice to them it would help a little bit, but only a very little bit. It is our nature to want to take away that sort of suffering. Of course, we can't. The only thing we can do is to be nice.
It's not always enough, it's just all that we can do.