Old Age, Sickness and Death

In the old age, we all started to get sick and died. My grandmother was a very religious person with a kind heart and spent most of her time helping unfortunate communities and mental centers… through her private charity. Though most people who knew her said she had very high merit. She was a very conscious saving person as she was living through a horrible war in Vietnam, which caused her to have an unhealthy diet. Though she worked out daily in the early morning, she had a good and healthy lifestyle until the last 8 years before her death. Her health deteriorated from Pakington disease. She was sickened and became bedridden. Then she became almost paralyzed in her last two years.

As having Parkinson's for many years priorly, she took medicine to control her movement. Then a doctor suggested to her son to abandon her medication as her old age advanced. The medication would damage her internal organs.

When she stopped to take her medication, her body stopped moving but became hardened. She couldn’t move or speak anymore, and because she long time laying on a bed, she developed some kind of skin infection, though it healed after many long months of cure. She died a year later at her own home, surrounded by most family members at age eight two. Though her last few years were not healthy and she suffered, she did have a long and religious life while living a life of kindness.

My grandfather died of lung cancer because of smoking all his life. If you get addicted to the cigarette, it’s extremely difficult to stop, or eventually, you can’t stop it. I remember one day when I came back to visit him, he was in the hospital for lung cancer, and he would still keep some cigarettes in his pocket. He hid from the doctor to smoke later. He couldn’t stop smoking even though he was on chemotherapy treatment for cancer. He complained his back was very painful, and cancer was eating out his body and slowly taking his life. Every day he got a message from his son-in-law, who tried to give him the massage, as the pain was craving his body.

He didn’t feel very much with normal massage pressure, he asked for such a strong massage to relieve the pain, and the son-in-law was afraid if he was giving too strong pressure, it might kill my grandfather. His pain was so great that he just begged for extreme-pressure massages. His physical body and mentality were reaching extreme suffering. Over a year later, he died of lung cancer at home.

Living a lifestyle at younger ages can define conditions of later years when we advance to old ages. The bad habits, unhealthy lifestyle when younger, the worst suffering of our old age. As humans, we are more advanced in all ways. We get to learn and cultivate wisdom not only in how to live physically healthy, eat healthily, living healthy at our young ages, as our body is a vessel that needs to be in good shape physically and mentally for us to cultivate spiritual success.