Fr. Jose Kaimlett One day I’m going to be lying in a hospital on a bed covered with a tight white sheet. There will come a moment when a doctor will confirm that there is no sign of life left in my brain, that my life is gone.At that time don’t try to revive me with all sorts of artificial mechanisms. And don’t talk about a casket or a funeral or a burial. Distribute whatever is still useful in my body to help others to live better or to stay alive. Give my eyes to someone who has never seen the sun rise, or the face of a newly born baby, or the love in the eyes of a woman. Give my heart to someone whose heart day in and day out tortures him with pain. Give my blood to some young man you have pulled from the wreckage of a car, so that he can live on and some day watch his grandchildren at play. Give my kidneys to someone who is being kept alive by a machine. Take my veins and arteries and bones and muscles and see if with them you can help some handicapped child to walk. Examine my brain to its smallest fold and remove from it whatever you want to experiment with. Perhaps some day it will help speech impaired boy or give hearing to a deaf girl. Cremate whatever is left of me and let the ashes fly everywhere in the wind so that flowers may bloom more beautifully. If there is anything you have to bury, let it be my mistakes, my weaknesses, my prejudices. Consign my sins to the devil, and my soul to God. If you want to remember me, do it with some good deed for the benefit of the people who need you, or with some good word. If you do al1 that then I will1ive forever.
-Robert N. Test in the “Cincinnati Post”
The house you had lived in dilapidated and in ruins, it is true. In any case you don’t need it any more. If a few bricks or tiles, or a window or a door of it would help make another man’s house a little more habitable, why not? How is it that so few of us would ever dare to think of doing little charity – most of the time as the recipients are concerned they are not little, but life-saving – with the things that we have no more use of, things that will only decay and rot away?
