TOO YOUNG TO DIE

    I recently took a trip to my native Nova Scotia to comfort a dear friend whose husband had just died, flying home two days after receiving the news of his death.

    Ron had been sick for two years, with metastatic cancer, and though he had sounded quite weak to me on the phone three days previously, I really thought he would be with us longer.  In so many ways Ron seemed to be indestructible, a mountain of a man, loved and respected by many.  Never one to mince words, assertive, articulate, highly intelligent and always ready with a big bear hug, he was one of my favorite people.

    Ron was a chemist, high school principal, teacher, author of text books, husband, father, and friend.  I had known and admired him for thirty-six years.  He left a mark on all who knew him and will be sorely missed.

    Gwen told me that Ron had confided in her that he felt he was too young to die.  At sixty-three he was the youngest of his relatives to be facing death.  His father is still alive and living in his own home at the age of ninety-two, his mother had passed away in her nineties.

    I thought a lot about what Gwen told me.  As a physician I have attended the deaths of people from birth to well over one hundred years of age.  In a way, I think they were all to young to die.  What if humans are capable of living for one hundred and twenty years or longer?  What if everybody is too young to die?

    While home in Nova Scotia I drove down the south shore to Hubbards, a small seaside community nestled in the St. Margaret's Bay area of the Lighthouse Route.  While waiting to join friends for lunch at a quaint little restaurant, I happened upon an old churchyard cemetery.

    St Luke's Anglican church sits on a small hill overlooking the water.  Records indicate that its cornerstone was laid in 1848 and its first service, a baptism, was held in 1850.  The little graveyard spills out over the hill and contains tombstones from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  The thing that struck me most about the cemetery was the number of children buried there. 

    The earliest child grave I found was that of a two-year old girl, daughter of the church minister.  Her little gravestone said that she was the youngest daughter of Rev. Henry Stamer and his wife.  She died in 1859 and the inscription on her tombstone reads "Suffer little children to come to me".  There were many other children represented in the small graveyard, the youngest being a mere three months old when he departed this life.

    One can only imagine what maladies took the lives of such tiny children and the young adults who are also buried there.  Certainly there were no antibiotics, no trauma centers, no emergency rooms, no state-of-the-art cardiac surgery centers available in those days, to the residents of that little Nova Scotia town.  Today we are horrified at the death of a child.  It is thought to be most unusual, and so it is, compared to the deaths of older adults.  We question any young person's death. 

    A century ago, and in times previous to that, it was not unusual for a family to suffer the deaths of multiple children.  People died of natural causes much earlier in their lives than they do today.  I suspect, though, that it was every bit as painful for parents to bury a child back then as it is now. 

    Every living thing on planet Earth has a birth, a time to live and a time to die.  It is the same for microbes, amoeba, plants, fish, birds, reptiles, mammals and people. Life is a cycle and we are all part of its rhythm. 

    At the memorial service for my friend Ron, the Anglican minister officiating told a metaphorical story about God being like a mother calling her children home from play.  He reminded us all that we will each eventually get called home, some of us much sooner than we planned.  One does not have to be religious or even to believe in God to understand the analogy he used.  I liked it and many people at the reception, following the service, commented on the appropriateness of the minister's comments.  I think his words brought comfort to family and friends alike. 

    It is a prudent way to look at life and death.  Death is a natural process.  We will all get called home from this life.  There is no escaping the eventuality of death. 

    Perhaps if we could think of death as a transition, a natural progression on life's journey, we would be better able to accept the deaths of our loved ones, no matter their chronological age, as well as the eventuality of our own demise.

Marlene Buckler, MD, FACEP    www.StayOutOfMyER.com