THESE ARE MY BROTHERS AND SISTERS

by Timir Banerjee, MD, FIENS Volunteer, Ethiopia, 2008

MAY 19th — After attending rounds, Drs. Tadios and Liu, the senior resident and I discussed chronic subdural and epidural hematoma. I discussed some fractures of C spine with Dr. Zenebe and saw a patient afflicted with malignant glioma affecting the dominant hemisphere and the corpus callosum.

Later that day, Dr. Zenebe took me to the burial ceremony of the father of one of his friends. I stood among some three hundred people in the middle of a field in front of a country church where men stood in somber silence. The women stood among us wearing long skirts with their heads covered by black or white chaddar. I stood out wearing a red shirt that said University of Louisville.

The priest sang into the microphone about the liberation of the soul as it journeyed towards the Pearly Gates. When the singing stopped a group of men picked up the casket and walked behind the church through a crowd of wailing women and teary eyed men. They laid him to rest in the grave next to where his wife was buried. All of us walked back to the front of the church where a retired colonel read the eulogy. Following the eulogy, the priest spoke again, saying, “As Christians we are born twice and we die once.” At the end everyone celebrated the deceased’s life by hugging and kissing one another repeatedly on alternate cheeks. Then everyone was offered fried corn kernels.

I thought to myself, “These are my brothers and sisters.” I stood among them in awe and imagined the happiness of the deceased at meeting his Maker after a successful life. The Sanskrit scholars say that life is a Maya, a transit to the eternal journey to sojourn with the Maker. I believe happiness and success are not mutually exclusive. We don’t have to smoke cannabis to be happy. However, we do have to get out of the rat race of desire because it is insatiable and will consume us. We must make time to love others and ourselves. We must bring joy to others by challenging ourselves and going places to help others. We should read poetry, learn to laugh at ourselves and always remember Gray’s Elegy written in a country churchyard:

Let not ambition mock their useful toil — Their homely joys and destiny obscure.

Since we do not know our own appointed time, we might as well be happy. Life is fragile! The sentence of life has to have a period to be meaningful otherwise it will only be a long sentence. I think Yogi Bera once said, “Make it a practice to attend others’ funerals otherwise no one will come to yours.”