back to the ifing..........there were dozens of factors in the accident....even one happening differently could have caused things to be different......yet everything fell into place that made the accident virtually inevitable (it was inevitable in the sense that it happened). All that may or may not be just my imagination, but those thoughts are probably what have given me the most relief....and seeing.....I was just a tiny cog in a wheel........
That's right, if you can see every event is rendezvousing then it all begins to make sense.
That's the mindset of unworthiness. You think there are lessons to learn and that you have to prove your worthiness? Suffering isn't necessary at all, it's optional.
I don't think he is taking up an 'unworthy' mindset per sé ;-)
I get his forged by fire kinda analogy insomuch as losing Kevin like that, as he was the one thing I was the most attached to in my whole life, and having it happen at such a transformative age just as I was passing into adulthood (turned 18 during that six months that he was in a coma), certainly played a big role in my life regarding not getting attached to things of this world and 'seeking' that which is source and constant.
I had a natural predilection for that kind of thing already growing up, but the Kevin situation certainly hyperboosted that aspect of this persona.
Your points about intuition are well taken and largely agreed with, would be a good topic for a thread of it's own ;-)
I will say that I only very briefly wrestled with any kind of personal guilt, because even though I was young, I guess I intuited pretty clearly that it was just something that was supposed to happen for reasons beyond my scope of understanding.
Like SDP said, there were so many 'if's' that had to line up for things to pan out the way they did that it can't be random chance...mathematically the chance of things happening the way they did would probably require a modern super computer just to calculate the odds....orders of magnitude higher than the chances of getting struck by lightning.
If I had gone to school....(that light sniffle that I used as an excuse to stay home turned into a bad flu two days later)
If I had driven him to school and come back home.
If I had let him use my car to drive himself.
If the bus had stopped at our driveway.
If it had not been raining.
If it had been after daylight savings time and been light out.
If there was no road construction.
If the guy who hit him had not been late to work and tired.
After he got hit his prognosis and amount of brain damage could have had an entirely different outcome too....he had whats called a coup-contra-coupe injury to the brain...no skull fracture....this kind of brain injury is like putting and apple in a pot with the lid on and shaking it violently, the apple will get little tares and lots of bruising on the outside surface....this caused his whole brain to swell and the only place the pressure in his head could vent was at his brain stem...which it did and caused a whole lot of damage to his brain stem, which left him unable to ever have even enough motor control to swallow food.
This did not have to happen as there is a procedure called Burr holes wherein they drill small wholes in the skull to vent the pressure in the brain and this creates a good prognosis for a very good recovery of full brain function over time.
So the next big 'if' was that when the ambulance came, normally, they would have called the medivac helicopter and choppered him to a major trauma unit down town where they routinely treat that kind if injury with the quick application of Burr Holes.
That chopper was tied up and could not get there for 15 minutes, that ambulance driver made a quick calculation that he could get Kevin to a local smaller ER in 12 minutes....that 'if' made a huge difference....also, his Doc seemed to be more about preparing us for his Eminent death than going through every treatment option....I read in the chart years later that he thought Kevin would be dead in less than an hour and would not survive the 45 minute transportation to a better equipped facility...who knows how many 'if's' had lined up in that Doc's life to make that poor judgement call at that exact moment? By all accounts he was a well regarded Doctor.
So many 'if's' that all had to line up...was supposed to happen exactly as it did...
As an aside....a couple years after he got hit, when the brain was not causing him pain any more, he seemed to live that next ten years or so in a kind of utter bliss...
Alternating between what seemed like these moments of utterly alert stillness, and then huge smiles and spontaneous laughter...think of a six month old baby that never cries to have his needs addressed...he lived in a permanent care facility, and with no means of communicating in any way in a traditional sense, he still attracted people who felt an affinity toward him like a Buddha or something...he was really like a totally silent mystic teacher...12 years with a waking silent mind....everybody who was in his presence felt uplifted and happy, which is a really weird thing to feel around a severely injured and crippled person...most people feel a little uncomfortable in the presence of the permanently invalided....but everyone 'lit up' into a smile around Kevin after those first few years.
Even in his utterly incapacitated state, totally incapable of standard communication or the ability to even swallow food on his own, he was a real gift to everyone who got to spend time with him....other patients at the facility would park their wheel chairs around him just to be near him while he sat all day alternating between perfect waking stillness and smiles and spontaneous laughter. Nurses from other parts of the hospital would go and sit in his room on their breaks just to be with him.
When he finally passed, over a hundred nurses and caregivers that had taken care of him over the years came to his funeral...most of whom did not even work at the facility any more but who had stayed following him, checking up on him for years after they moved on to other jobs...was very beautiful.
The thing was, that how we grew up, was fifty fifty whether you would end up a criminal or not, and I always worried about him cause he carried anger at the injustice of our childhood and was beginning to go the wrong way so to speak...one of the reasons I didn't drive him to school that day was cause I caught him stealing money from another kid's locker for lunch money and we had gotten into a big fight...
That same kid, through the worst kind of tragedy, ended up being such a light in so many people's lives just by sitting in a wheelchair, being silent, and smiling.
SDP....it was a tragedy, but you may never fully comprehend what greater beauty may have came into this sphere of existence from that perfect conflarigation of circumstances...might even be generations before it bares fruit, but it either has, is, or will....EVERYTHING bares out into beautiful harmony eventually.