first to go is your ability to be capable of sadness

 first to go is your ability to be capable of sadness

fiction

edward w pritchard

As you sit watching an old woman with her eyes closed waiting to stop breathing eventually you become incapable of contemplating the sadness of death and the briefness of existence. That was my assignment as an orderly at a local nursing home for the well to do when I was a college student and for about two weeks I sat in the room and read while we waited for a very

wealthy old woman of 92 to die. Eventually she died when I was at classes in college and when I returned 

to work one Monday she was gone and already the student nurses had moved a new patient to her room and the old man in the private room was watching tv and being difficult when I took him his graham crackers. 

It was very different when I was an orderly at the burn ward in the children's hospital and I had to sit a full shift with a three year old child who had been severely burned in a house fire. The patient was full of medicine and no longer in severe pain but it was difficult to stay in the room despite the money and reading or doing school assignments were impossible. It seemed such a travesty for a young child to die. That little girl didn't die I heard but I can still remember her screams when when we had to  initially immerse her in a large iron bath tub to soothe her burns twice a day for a few weeks. 

I do not like to see children suffer. I who as I wrote before  who was dead calm with two guns to my head in a robbery at a hotel cringe when I see children in pain. [1]

Please despite your philosophical convictions  get your covid vaccines to keep children from suffering 

from future unknown strains of the mutating covid virus. 

Hopefully in a year or two you won't be assigned to burial duty to burn and bury twenty two thousand victims  of a new strain of the covid virus who died in your home county in 2023. One thing is for sure it's impossible to predict the future. Do the right thing while you can. 

[1] if you are so inclined read Hegel " Lordship and bondage " from "Phenomenology of mind" on proper historical behavior in an armed robbery