Finding meaning in difficult circumstances.
Story of an actual situation that two doctors faced with a women who tried to commit
suicide. A mother of a boy who died at the age of eleven was admitted to a hospital after
a suicide attempt, the doctor had asked her to tell her story, at the death of the 11 year
old boy this mother was left alone with an older son who was crippled and suffering from
the effects of infantile paralysis. The mother rebelled against her fate and tried to
commit suicide along with her son who prevented her from doing so, he liked living!
At this point the doctor asked another women to participate in and improvise, he asked
her to think of herself being 80 years old and on her death bed and to look back on her
life as if she was childless but a life full of financial success and social prestige, the
doctor asked her to imagine what she would feel in this citation. What would you think of
it? What will you say to yourself?
Hear is what she actually said , "Oh I married a millionaire, I had an easy life
full of wealth, and I lived it up! I flirted with men and teased them, but now I am eighty
and I have no children, looking back as an old woman I cannot see what it was all for, my
life was actually a failure. Then he asked the woman of the crippled son to imagine
herself similarly look back over her life? Hear what she actually said " I wished to
have children and that wish was granted, one boy died and the other, the crippled one
would have been in an institution if I had not taken over his care, though he is crippled
and helpless he is after all my boy, and so I have made a fuller life possible for him, I
have made a better human being out of my son. At that moment there was an outburst of
tears, crying she continued: As for myself I can look back and say my life was full of
meaning, and I have tried hard to fulfill it, I have done my best and my life was no
failure.
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