If your faith tells you that there is a god in this world, then I ask you to do one thing for me — to help assemble a small fragment of Him.
I come from a country that believes in reincarnation and karmic consequence. We grow up hearing that good is rewarded, that saving a single life is worth more than building a tower to the heavens. These phrases are repeated so often that they begin to sound like comfort, not reality. I believed them once — until I learned that understanding suffering does not make it kinder.
A few years ago, the pandemic left me with severe complications. I lost most of my physical ability, retaining only the most basic functions of daily life. I lost my job. My world slowly shrank into a bed, a room, a phone, and a few people who still remembered that I existed.
During those years, my dog died. My body declined, my savings disappeared, and my future became indistinct. Only my mother did not leave me. She helped me relearn how to live, cared for me, and encouraged me to stay alive. If she gave me my first life forty years ago, then in these years she has almost lent me her own, so that I could continue to exist.
Now she is being taken from me — by a stroke and by cancer.
I have tried everything I know how to do. I still cannot gather enough money. All of my savings were exhausted during my recovery, and now there is only one bill in front of me that I cannot pay: twenty thousand dollars. This may be the most important sum of money in my life. It is not to help me live better. It is to prevent me from watching her die.
I am not good at asking for help. I am not even good at admitting that I am helpless. As my muscles have slowly weakened, the only thing I have been able to continue doing is writing — poems for my mother, and messages to the few people online who still know I am here.
A friend in Vancouver suggested that I ask the internet for help.
“At least you don’t have to kneel in the street and hold out your atrophied hands,” he said. I know he meant no harm. He simply did not know how else to keep me from despair.
He taught me how to use an online wallet, and before he left he said one thing:
“If you are willing to believe that a digital-age messiah might descend on the internet and save a dying family, then go and try.”
So here I am.
I have nothing left to offer in exchange. No future. No value. No dignity. Not even pride. I have only one request.
If you are willing to help, please think of it not as helping me, but as helping the world be slightly less cruel. Please think of your kindness as one small fragment, added back to a god that may already be broken — so that, at least for this moment, He can be said to have existed.
https://paragraph.com/@wg-david/preview/7VsavXmzyHxHLWtA9OFn
