Circumstance.

Sometimes circumstance grips you in the only way it knows how.

And as if to prove to you, by some sort of Sign, that you are going to be okay, something comes along and ruins the path you've drawn out, and expects you to re-align that path, if only so you can prove to yourself that you are capable.

Are you supposed to sit around and wait for it to be over? Are you supposed to sit around and complain about the series of your plans that the Higher Power has just trampled on? Are you supposed to sit around and cry?

No.

You're supposed to pick up the pieces. Take the scraps and make them into something viable. Circumstance is ugly. It is the ugliest beast you will ever meet. On your dying day, you will sit and contemplate the things you could have done differently. You can't do any of them differently. That is why this book is called Life, and the chapters are called Fate, and the words are called Days. The footnotes might be labelled "possible changes", but one can't be sure. This book won't be published until it will be too late for us to read it.

The first dead body I faced directly was in my second week of clinicals.
I remember. My seven classmates and I walked into that room, to see a lady named Florence who had passed on about 20 minutes earlier. She was 93. A country version of "The Weight" was playing on her bedside radio. The song, which couldn't have been any more than four minutes, seemingly lasted for hours, and still, when I think of her, I hear it. She was wearing a floral blouse, and her chest looked as if it would rise and fall normally any second. A red quilt covered her legs. Her pink slippers poked through the bottom of it. A glass of water was on her night stand. Her pills were next to it. This was going to be a normal day for Florence. It was supposed to be. It was the end of March. She had lived through 93 months of March. Spring had just begun. Florence had gotten dressed this morning, opened her drapes, and fell back asleep, peacefully. Her face glowed in a calming manner. This was a woman who had raised her children, saw her grandchildren grow up, and then lived out her last days in a room with a window and a view of a parking lot. She was fine with that. You could just tell. The radio played "Take a load off, Fanny/take a load for free/take a load off, Fanny, and put the load, you put the load right back on me" and my classmates and I hummed along while our teacher explained the clinical definitions of death. We didn't care. We knew Florence was dead. Not because some piece of medical equipment told us she was, but because of the peace you could see when you looked at her. None of us being particularly religious, it was surprising when we bent our heads down in prayer simultaneously. It didn't matter then what you labelled us. We were a bunch of equally lost twenty and thirty somethings, holding hands, praying for the soul of a dead woman that none of us particularly knew. It was sad and it was beautiful. It was early morning, just after breakfast. We were due for our smoke break. Nobody said anything. We waited for the funeral home people to arrive, and we held open the doors, heads bent down, tears in our eyes, as they rolled the guerney into the van. When they asked us to say some words, we said the words that came to us naturally, unscripted - and they were beautiful.

We had all come so far that year. One woman had lost her four year old daughter to a crippling disease. One had had a miscarriage. Some had been refugees, relocated from war torn countries. None of us were particularly college material. Someone or some thing had meant for us to be there that day. Usually we gossiped or complained, but on that morning, we stood still in a recollection that none of us would ever forget.

The first raw soul I encountered was in that of Margery, at a special home for those with Alzheimer's and Dementia. She wasn't dead, but you could tell her mind was trapped between this world and the other. Even though my two week placement at Highview was the most physically and emotionally draining thing I've ever done, I would easily re-live those two weeks of my life over and over again if I thought my mind could take it.

Margery no longer could find the words to carry on a conversation, but it didn't mean she was empty. When robbed of all human communication devices, save for facial expression and touch, one may think the situation is hopeless. Margery taught me more about life than any professor ever could. I would arrive for my 3-11 shift around 1:00 just so I could sit in the courtyard with Margery for a couple of hours before I was on the clock. She spoke in gibberish. "Yadda yada... done," she would say. Margery was never really done. Her commentary was priceless. You could never understand the words she was saying, but you could feel the thoughts she was thinking. Her approach to life was so child-like, so pure. We would sit on a wicker love seat and spend hours looking through "Felines of the World", and she would kick off her shoes and give me the biggest hug you could ever imagine when we got to the page with the Scottish Folds. We would read books about the Queen, and about Canadian tourist attractions.

We would walk the length of the courtyard, and stand at the fish pond, and she would be purely in awe of the yellow fish that had lived there for years and years, and of the plastic frog with the motion sensor. We would walk that path in the courtyard for hours on end. We would go inside and watch sitcoms on rainy days, and every time something funny happened, Margery would grip my hand and have the silliest grin on her face. It didn't matter if I didn't have bus tickets to get home, or if I hadn't had the $2 to buy the staff dinner that night - Margery's grin was enough to keep my spirits up.

Circumstance is ugly. Nobody could tell you the things Florence and Margery had seen when they were our age, but it was probably far worse than dealing with Creditor So-and-So or whether they had phone service. Life takes us down paths and winding circles, and the only thing you can really rely on is Murphy's Law. What can go wrong, will go wrong, and there is no doubt about that. The only other two certainties are death and taxes.

So, someday, when you are screaming mad, or so depressed that you think nothing will work out - think of an experience you had that changed your life. It can be something simple and seemingly unimportant. The first time you bounced a cheque, and how humiliating it was...but how you fixed it. The first time you got on the wrong city bus and ended up an hour late for an important interview. The first time you drank yourself into oblivion and realised it didn't fix a damn thing.

Sometimes, life throws us curveballs. Sometimes, it's hard to recover from a prolonged series of them. As soon as you stand up, you are shot back down. I guess my point with this, is even though we all have different abilities, different qualifications, different occupations, different outlooks, and varying levels of sanity - we are all human. Our time here is short. Do not spend it worrying or obsessing about how you could have spent it better. There will come the days where you want to hide under your blankets for a few months. There will come the days when you do just that. There will come the days where you constantly wonder "what if"? But your life is working out the way it is supposed to be. You won't believe it today, tomorrow, or five years from now. But whatever is happening is happening for a reason, a reason we cannot understand. But someone/something out there does, and rightfully, you wouldn't be handed these challenges if you could not overcome them.

The point is not to regret things you've done, but to learn from them. Florence didn't die peacefully because of her bank balance. She had lived a full life. She was listening to the birds in the trees outside, as they were rediscovering spring. She was tired. She fell asleep for the last time with the most inspirational smile I've ever seen. As we turned to leave her room, the nurse flicked the radio off, and the Weight was truly lifted.