When significant people in my life and the lives of loved ones pass, I always tend to spend time wondering what we are all really living for. Everyone has reasons for the choices they make – why they chose their school or profession, why they like vanilla more than strawberry, or why they chose one shirt over another in the morning. But how often is it that we actually stop and ask ourselves what we are really living for? For the people in our lives who make us miserable, why do we continue to associate with them? For the jobs that work us like slaves and give us little benefits, why do we not exert the short term efforts of finding a new one for a long term gain?

Uncle Bob made a lot of choices that I told him I thought were odd. Why stay in a loveless, hate-filled marriage and continue to see that person every day and partly support them? Why spend all day and night caring for your terminally ill mother when you don’t get any pleasure from it, and you see it as a true hindrance to living a real life, and you know there are many options that could better care for her than you as a single person could? Maybe some of us are programmed to be such creature of habits that we just seem to accept misery and pain as a necessary and even integral part of our lives, even something that we oddly subconsciously crave because we are so used to it.

I’m in New Zealand, arguably the most beautiful country in the world right now. Uncle Bob loved travel but never got the chance to visit Australia or New Zealand. He did say he wanted to see it someday, but now that someday will never happen. I’m sure he would have loved this. In the midst of all this beauty, I feel sad and silent thinking about the fact that he will never have the opportunity to come here in this human form. At least Ed via Bart gets to visit New Zealand. Who will allow Bob to vicariously live through themselves to experience more earthly life than he was allowed in his own flesh and blood?