Do you ever ponder the ultimate questions, such as what life is all about? What is the worth of an individual human being? Does it all really matter? Why are we doing this?
Most of the time I don’t wrestle with such humongous issues. Got enough other stuff to think about. But over the past week or so, those questions have trampled their way into my mind. And I haven’t come up with any good answers.
One thing that caused me to think about this is my mother. She’s in her eighties now, and has entered the “really old” stage of life. She can’t walk anymore, her memory fades in and out, one of her eyes is going, and she sleeps more than half the day. Every month or so she gets a little bit weaker, needs more help, and can no longer do something that we take for granted. You can just see her life being taken away in little pieces, bit by bit. And yet she doesn’t seem ready to quit yet. She gets cranky, but she’s not depressed. That in itself amazes me sometimes.
Another thing that inspired such weighty thoughts in me was a recent visit I made during work hours to the Homicide Unit. I had to talk with a chief assistant attorney about something, and since I’m not a prosecutor but just a lowly administrative munchkin, I had to wait 10 minutes while the attorney in question jabbered on the phone with someone, partly talking about murder cases, partly about the furniture in her living room. I spent my waiting time just looking around the room, watching detectives and attorneys and clerks working and wandering about and drinking coffee. The Homicide Unit can be a pretty intense place, but I found it in a relatively peaceful state that afternoon, with the sun shining in through the windows. And for a moment or two I got that feeling, that sensation that you get when you’re on the edge of a cliff staring down into the chasm. What is a life? What does it mean? Why do we feel this way about it?
Well, I caught my balance and the attorney finally talked to me. It wasn’t too important, so I was out of there pretty quickly. She got on to the next murder file and I got on to the next monthly cost report. What is it all about? I still don’t know. But it has something to do with our ability to ponder such questions and to feel dizzy when on the boundary of life and death. If you’ve never thought about it, you’ve never really lived. “Study death, learn to live” — I saw that line in a New York Times movie review the other day. The movie in question was “The Battle of Shaker Heights”. The reviewer didn’t really like the movie. Wonder how the Times would review a movie about our Homicide Unit, were someone to make such a movie?