Or if that matters at all

Two summers ago I volunteered at a Nursing Home in Minnesota so I could be with people, mostly elderly ladies. My voluntaryeer work occurred daily at the beginning but wound up being more sporadic after two weeks till the end of summer. My host mom at the time once asked me if I were truly humanitarian and cared about those little old ladies in their 80s and 90s because it seemed odd that an 18-year-old young man could be more fond of being surrounded by elders on the verge of dying, than to be with friends at his own age. True, depressingly, every once a few weeks someone died. They carried away with them all their memories and emotions. The utmost cruel conclusion of a human life, somehow, ought to be death. It was not death that inspired me, after all. It was their struggle to live the last breath of their lives. Most of them couldn't walk. Their muscles were so weak that literally everything they had to do to continue their lives were assisted by caregivers. They fell asleep at any unpredictable time and sometimes it made me feel they were so close, but also so far away, in their own worlds. Still some just never woke up again. The closer to the point of death, I fathom, the closer it is for us to apprehend life itself. I often wonder, after that voluntary experience, that if I am fortunate to live up to that ripe old age, what I will have come up with when I am sitting in a wheel chair. That image has helped me ever since, to let go, let live, and live.