How Do You Make People Realize the Value of a Human Life?

What do you think is the value of one human life?

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I think there are two instances when we come at the finest points of realizing the value of a human life. The first one is when a mother gives birth to her child. The second one is when someone close to us dies.

On my part, I have realized it when I lost my grandmother. Although she was already 94 years old then, and we cared for her at home several months before she passed away, it was still a shocking moment when she died.

It was not that she did not die in peace. Because she did. I believe that she died a blessed death surrounded by her family. She died with the sacraments and with the prayers of those who loved her.

Yet even then, that moment when she finally breathed her last was something we could never forget. How could we? Up until her last day, we could still talk to her. Her breathing may be labored, but her mind was clear. She had been with us to her very last hour.

In the blink of an eye, however, she died. She was gone from us, never to be heard again. Never to be with us again.

A person doesn’t need to do much to notice one’s absence once the person is gone. You’d feel the difference. The feeling that the soul has finally left the physical body.

While a person is still there, no matter how sick or unconscious, the presence of life can still be felt. But once the person dies, everything becomes empty. The kind of emptiness that cannot be filled again.

How could it be filled again? None can replace a human being. None can ever replace a human life.

Science may one day reach as far as creating a robot that looks just like the person you’ve lost. But that artificial creation would never have the same eyes that looked at you, the same ears that listened to your cries, the same fingers that touched you and made you feel how much you were loved.

Even if someone were to steal the physical body of a dead person to preserve it and to make of it some monster that moves somehow, that would be the greatest desecration to human life because the physical body would be forced like a puppet to move without a soul.

Life is so valuable because it is unique and once it’s gone, you could never give it back. It doesn’t matter how rich or powerful you are. You can never return a soul to a person who has died.

And because you could never give it, how could you so easily take it away? Dare not think you could put a price in someone’s life for it can never be bought.

A new life may come to us, as when a child is born, but none of us can ever will that same life again. For not even a twin can copy another soul.

Only one person can see us and hear us and think about us in the exact same way. Only one person can make us feel loved in a way that no other person ever could again.

And that’s how valuable one human life is. You can learn to re-create a star, but never the same human being. Never the same human life.

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