The fear that stems from love

In the summer of 2009, I was reading New Moon, the second book in the Twilight series. In the epilogue I came across the word, ‘Epiphany’. As it happens with me some words catch my fancy, they are sort of my favorite words. They become a non rewritable part of my word database, they simply stick along. Epiphany is one of them.
I find epiphanies intriguing. It is quite strange how a thought you must have once battled with or remained oblivious to, elucidates itself in an abrupt manner. I am sitting in a hospital. An hour ago I witnessed a dead body being whisked away in an ambulance. A woman crying profusely at the helm of the corpse. Five days ago, a loved one fell ill, the news of which was being kept from me. However owing to an intuitive mind and a flawed execution, I discovered about the illness. I had a set of lugubrious thoughts, fears, anticipations in this context which I had one by one diligently erased from my mind over the past 120 hours. But the sight of the corpse and wails afloat in the periphery brought all those fears to the forefront.
In the same summer, I had almost given assent to the decision of becoming a doctor and subsequently reverted from it. The turnaround was because at that point the images of blood and dissection terrified me. I was the sort of person who couldn’t stand the sight of non vegetarian food being cooked. I was partially doubtful if I had the brains to sustain the arduous curriculum. I wasn’t willing to commit ten years of my life to a profession I wasn’t completely sure of. Thus I concluded that I shouldn’t be a doctor.
Five years later, an epiphany has struck me. I am far too sentimental to make a career in a profession where death and mourning are an inevitability. I hate hospitals. The stench of grief that runs abound in an hospital makes me cringe. The sound of the ECG machines, the clinking of the metal instruments, the odor of medicines, the sharp needles, the screams of the patients, blood oozing out of injuries, the mechanised approach of doctors, all induce an emotion akin to that of a Dementor. Sadly I do not even have a Patronus charm to shoo it away. I dread deaths. Reading about them, witnessing them or watching it on the celluloid leave a dent on my mind which is strengthened through a series of bad dreams that follow. I can’t risk losing someone I love, they cannot even fall sick on my watch. It makes my mind go crazy.
Now that I am thinking of it, I would have lost my sanity had I become a doctor. To be in the vicinity of people who have fallen sick and people who have affection parked on them, seems quite a monumental chore. To witness the pain of these both unflinchingly and impassively is a skill that will elude me forever.
I had read about Gautam Buddha in school. At eighteen when he discovered about aging, illness and death (the three bitter truths of life which were astutely hidden from him) he found it prudent to surrender all his riches and embark on a quest to find God which he later renamed as the quest for Nirvana. I never understood his decision but in a second epiphany I have come to realize that now his seems a more rational course of action. If we are all going to succumb to death one day, is there any rationale in investing affection in people, forming relationships and nurturing them, qualing at the loss of a kin and learning to live with the void that death leaves in our hearts. Is there a point at all?