Departure

I read about her death in the papers.
It shouldn't have come as a shock. I knew mentally a long time she didn't had much time left.
So the news didn't strike me hard. It was more of a sense of finality, like it was going to happen, and now that it did, perhaps she would have a sense of release.
Still the facts are laid bear for all to see. A young woman, on the cusp of adulthood, cruelly cut down after only a mere 20 years.
I guess she made me realise that the scale of my problems and grievances with the world in general are very superficial. Here I was griping about unimportant things while she was there fighting cancer.
Over the course of my ambulance attachment I had a case of one guy who tried to commit suicide by cutting his wrist. Thinking back now, I would grabbed the guy by the collar and shouted in his face that he should cherish his life as there are many others out there who want to live very badly.
I never really knew her very well.
Thus, I didn't cry.
Perhaps there was no need to cry, for she had moved on to a place where the pain and suffering of the flesh are gone. A place reserved for people who faced death with such bravery and grace.
I used to think there's no such thing as dying in dignity. Death is death, the final answer. There is no more.
I still believe so. She may have left us, her death yet another statistic of a human being who has succumbed to cancer, yet she left an undying legacy.
She taught us, especially those who had forgotten how to so, like me, how to live life.
Joan, rest in peace.