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Just Enough

I was down with a very bad cold for over a week. At the lowest point it was as mentally exhausting as it was physically. A cold is not something that is even relevant mentioning to anyone but I did have to take a day off to recover. Yet, it brought one some end of life thoughts for me. Particularly, difficult was to think about the one or two people in my life that matter a lot of to me and how they might manage my passing. On the one hand you want to be missed and remembered for the good you did your life on the other, you don't want the people who you love most to grieve so much that they can no longer function. 

How much is enough and when it is too much. I could not help thinking what a ridiculously vain metric this thing was. If the person is dead, what do they care if they are missed or not, mourned or not. They are done with all that. Everything of consequence has to happen before their passing. Once the worst of the cold was past me, I was back to my normal routine and end of life thoughts had disappeared. Instead, I was thinking about how I was failing in small ways to make the time I have left with my parents truly count. That is the metric that actually matters not how grief-stricken and heart-broken I am after their passing. In fact, it may have been this very guilt that I experienced very acutely on those couple of days when I felt so completely spent.

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