Diaspora

I fully reject this notion of wholeness.

I have never been whole.  More like an incomplete conglomeration of parts,  friends, lovers, and family have all received a bit of me.  As I have given myself freely.

And I worry, as a physician especially, what will be left.  As I tend to the sick and dying I wonder if that which is transferred will be lost forever with the frailty of the heart beat, the rattle of the lungs.  Much better to be an obstetrician, I reason, who bestows each piece upon a burgeoning miracle.  There is great longevity in such things.

But as I rest at the bedside in those last moments of illness, I wonder if what I am giving is even mine to bestow. Is it me sitting there or my father ( a physician himself who died when I was a little boy)? These thoughts can be dizzying.

The hair on my head grays and grows scarce.  The seasons blur as if someone waited till the middle of the movie and then hit the fast forward button.  It brings comfort to think that although the body becomes feeble, a diaspora of pieces grows and flourishes out in the world.  A human tapestry of parts past far and wide from continent to continent, generation to generation, person to person.  Our bodies die but our souls live on in those we have touched?

The currency of humanity is neither money nor love.  For "love" is an amorphous concept not well defined by us realists.  I have come to believe that it's the best parts of ourselves that we give to others.  These are the ties that bind communities.  This is the bedrock of the generations.

You may ask, my dear reader, how all this rambling concerns the present company.  

As I see it.  Bit by bit, day by day, blog post by blog post.

I am giving a little piece of myself.

To you.