A moment to reflect on how lucky I am to be here: I have the best parents in the world. They weren't always like that. They may always have been smarter than most, but not necessarily wiser. It was life experiences that made them this kind, and if it weren't for their kindness I would not be here. They didn't always agree with me, of course, but even through our disagreements they almost always made me feel like I was still basically accepted. Of course there were exceptions, but the point is, if they had been as arrogant as most parents, it would've been enough to drive me over the edge during my suicidal teen years — but their kindness was always just enough to allow me to see a chance to carry on.
And yet, there's a dark twist to this that makes all this quite a bit less cloying: they would never have had a chance to understand what I went through hadn't they lost a child, my brother, just before I was born. The way my father described mourning sounds very much like what I went through in depression: a feeling of being so detached from the world that it loses all meaning. That feeling gave them pause, made them wonder what really mattered life, until, as my father related to me, they decided that all that could possibly matter in the whole of existence is love. I went through the same phase myself, and before that, they would've been as egotistical as I was before that: ambitious, and therefore blinded to all else. Like so many parents, they would've driven me to suicide during my depression because all they could see was my failure, and not my vulnerability. They wouldn't have been able to see things in the perspective of the transience which turns all into a flux.
So is it because my brother died that I am alive, and am I guilty for surviving him? Well, no.
Fortunately, I have no cause to fret about this, because if it weren't that I picked up my mother's stress hormones about my brother's death through the umbilical cord, I would probably never have gone through such intense depression in the first place. His death not only changed my parents — it changed me, even when I was still in the uterus. Therefore, one chain of causality resulting from his death merely saved my life from another arising from the same cause. Nonetheless, in both ways, it has determined the way I grew up, and I live with that responsibility, and with the spirit of remembering death.
What I take away from all this is to be grateful to be alive, and that for unconditional love is a necessity to be alive. It doesn't matter where it comes from… it always comes from an instinct within, an instinct that awakens in the darkness, where we can see its flicker lead us onward. We all need to be humbled somehow, and the death of a child is the worst way that we can possibly go through that process — but hadn't they learned the lesson then, they would've lost me too. We shouldn't let it come that far, and accept each other as we are, unconditionally, before it is too late. There are many ways in which inacceptance drives people to suicide, as its insinuation is slowly instilled to them that if their loved ones do not want them the way they are, life itself rejects them, and casts them out to its margins to languish and die. All of us are suicidal to some extent, through the very way we live our lives without respect for our own lives or others', and it is always, one way or another, because we feel forbidden to be who we are. But when our suffering becomes so extreme that we cannot but let go, all the noise falls away and love is the only thing that can still drive us to take another breath.
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