sacrifice

-- Sacrifice is the spirit of love

Summer vacation has almost come to an end, and as I traveled back, I finished reading 犠牲(sacrifice) written by Kunio Yanagida (published the same year Into the Wild was).  It's an essay about his son, Yojiro, who committed suicide at the age of 25 after suffering metal illness for more than a decade.  One of his problems being anthropophobia, it was difficult for him to get a job, and thus he despaired that he had nothing he could give to society.

At the same time, he was deeply moved by one of Tarkovsky's films, Sacrifice, which expresses the belief that the reason we can live today in peace is due to "the sacrifice of a nameless person who lives somewhere under the broad blue sky".  When Yanagida finds his son brain dead, he agrees to donate his kidneys as a token of Yojiro's existence, thinking that this kind of 'sacrifice' was what he had always wanted.

One of the things Yojiro feared most was oblivion -- the fact that when one dies, even the fact that he lived and suffered will be forgotten and deleted from history.  A character from a book I read last summer states the exact same thing, to which the protagonist retorts that he should get over the fear, because "there was a time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after".  Her point is that even if some people remember you after your death, they too are going to die, and in the end, there will be no one remaining to remember you anyway.  This logic applies even to the world's most famous person, because at some point, the human species will extinct, and the planet will collapse.

I guess it's a decent argument, but obviously, the truth that everyone dies doesn't really liberate you from the fear of death.  Logically, I understand that everything is going to disappear one day, that it's nonsense to dwell on whether or not you will survive death for what amounts to less than a fraction of a second in geological time.  But emotionally, I still fear the possibility of dying leaving nothing behind.  I want to give my life some kind of meaning, and I think a lot of people do, including my mother.

To tell the truth, I'm a terrible daughter -- deep down in my heart, I have not always respected her.  I've told her more than once that I will never live a life like hers, and that I was 'different'.  Apart from the years she spent working as a language teacher, she has worked as a full time housewife, and since she started seeing her 60th birthday coming around the corner, she started asking herself (and her family) the meaning of her own life.  She suddenly realized she had no personal accomplishments, and began questioning the value and meaning of her 'self-sacrifice'.

Now I realize that the real reason I sometimes have a hard time respecting my mother is only because she is too busy imagining what she could've become and regretting what she could've done that she sadly fails to see the meaning of the life she has actually lived -- the whole process she calls self-sacrifice.

After reading Sacrifice (and all the other books I've read), and living my life for more than 1/4 of a century, I have come to the conclusion that the meaning of life comes from 'giving' which often requires sacrifice.  When I give, the receiving person will also give to another person, and that person will do the same and pay it forward.  We will all die, but we will all live on as a participant of a 'giving relay' as long as it goes on.

I don't know how much I will be able to give in my lifetime, how many people I will be able to help when I become a doctor, but every patient I help would not have been saved without my mother's 'sacrifice'.  Will my patients think of my mother's existence?  Most likely not; they wouldn't even remember the doctor after a while.  And does that make my mother's life meaningless?  Is she eventually going to disappear forever in cold oblivion?  I'd say yes to the latter.  But does that matter so much when the unmovable truth is that my mother's sacrifice has helped me help the patient (in some way) to live his life and pay it forward (to someone who hopefully will pay it forward)?

Yojiro, at some point, encounters the concept of "indestructibility of human existence" which appears in a passage written by Mircea Eliade, and states as follows:  Every death has contributed to the continuity of life, and my own current life is standing upon the sacrifice of numerous nameless soldiers.

We all fear oblivion because that is our final death.  It's scary to think that the evidence that we ever existed is as fragile as a drawing on sand.  But even if it is a picture on sand, there are new pictures that will not exist without it.  Our life, our sacrifice and love will always be of someone's support, and it's encouraging to think that just because we will never escape oblivion will never change that fact -- something we might call the meaning of life.

I should now call my mom and tell her how much I've appreciated her 'sacrifice'.  Because that is why I also want to live to love and give.