My dad got brain cancer when I was 25. That event accelerated our decision to have kids, and as a result our first daughter was born a few days after I turned 27.
The reasoning I came to is that given the probabilities of how children are conceived, if my dad didn't have cancer, our first child would have been someone else than our daughter.
So basically wishing anything different for my dad would be wishing that my daughter didn't exist.
And I guess that made his death easier for me to accept.
At the risk of sounding vulgar, moving your hips at a slightly different rhythm or conceiving half a second later or any number of completely minute changes to the timeline would also have resulted in a completely different child.
This reminds of the moment when Emil Cioran's mother mentioned how she should have aborted him outright. This led him to the insight that his life was largely an accident contingent on small factors, and that it therefore need not be taken so seriously.
It's the inevitable logical conclusion based on how human reproduction works. The chance of getting the same spermatozoon in there, the same random genetic variations, the same developmental conditions and so forth is infinitesimally small if the same exact conditions are not met.
Even if we ignore all of that, there's still the swirling chaos of causality to contend with, forever altered by that small change...
Amazing wisdom. In Judaism we say that bad things that happen to us are enablers of the good things. Whatever one believes, it's a really good attitude. Thank you for sharing your story.
The reasoning I came to is that given the probabilities of how children are conceived, if my dad didn't have cancer, our first child would have been someone else than our daughter.
So basically wishing anything different for my dad would be wishing that my daughter didn't exist.
And I guess that made his death easier for me to accept.