In terms of medical news, many of us, physician Robert Abramson, writing in a recently New York Times op-ed article, have grown accustomed to a "wait and see" attitude.  We go to the doctor, receive a potentially troubling diagnosis and are then told to come back in six months for a follow-up, to see whether it is really so.  We live for the future, the future that we hope will bring better news than the present.  But we really never know.
     Dr. Abramson is absolutely correct:  we really never know about the future.  His solution is to appreciate what we have in the here and now and allow it to "teach us to be present in" it.  Yet finite as we are, we still live in contingency, hanging in an epistemological abyss, never able to fully reconcile ourselves to our fate.  So we "wait and see."
     At the end of our lives, however, what will we be waiting to see?  The end?  Or more to the point, an absolute end?  If this is so, we will have lived even the most immensely full lives just and only to see them, one unavoidable day, end.  Is that really the sum of existence?  Is that it?
     Impossible:  our sense of purpose, our irrepressible sense of purpose, redounds against it.  Possibility must ever remain.  As the rebirthed natality of Easter shines ever more brightly this week, let us remind ourselves that in a universe of purpose even that most fearsome of possibilities, death, is but a new beginning.  One day, we will not "wait and see."  We will only "see."