What if a person cannot enjoy their life?--great question.
On my way to my doctor's I stopped to see my friend who is living this question.
Not three weeks past her 18 year old son was obliterated in a car crash. Alcohol involved.
She has other children, but there is much about this son's death that has shaken her in a fundamental way. She asks: what is the reason to live? Why did I have children?
We have talked before about faith, religion. She was/is uncertain of God's role in life while I told her that I have left my old christian theologies, only accepting that "Love is God" plus the Golden Rule. Later she and I shared the burden of tending to her chickens after a dog attack. Thus the thoughts between us of life, suffering and death had a more practical yet emotional context. Yet, when her 5 year old asked me what I was doing with three badly injured birds and an ax, she uncomfortably interjected a gloss, an obfuscation. She was not comfortable telling him what was occuring and why.
I asked her if I could answer her boy, he being smart, having asked for a real answer. She allowed me to tell him why I was doing a kindness for the birds while the dog's actions were not.
She is struggling to grasp a real answer for living--and not just for herself. To know why life has meaning is a wide open question to her children now. Her one son is gone and her own mother's comment that God perhaps (mercifully) spared him a future agony by an early demise has not satisfied her. Her son is beyond her reach under the ground, she says. He left before she did. Too young.
She says "I have to go on or else I have to die. One or the other." But she has lost her joy and sense of purpose.
All I can say is this: And we know there is death from early on. Her son, from a letter she found in his effects, clearly wanted good for his mother. For his mother never to laugh again -- this would be no monument to him that he would want. he did not want his younger brothers and sisters to have his mother's joy die entirely with him. Yet--- If her laughter is forever changed--well, that is the work of suffering. That laughter changes. But to be stopped forever?
I do not think so.
We all must help each other here. this is where we help and love one another.
We do need to help each other--every chance we get.
Just my thoughts.
...OUTLAW