Selflessness or Selfishness?

Ashes. In every description of the landscape in The Road, the picture described to us is always dirt, grime, dust...ashes. A fire? What happened? Was it a nuclear bomb, the end of the world?

After whatever happened, whatever it was, everything died. But there were people still alive. And from the way the dad talks about them, they seem to all be evil, except for him and his son.

His wife just walked away one day, just got up and left her husband and her son. Was this an act of selflessness, or selfishness? There were two bullets left. She said that it made the most sense to just die, become nothingness, rather than stay in the ashes and risk being overtaken by the evil ones. But did her walking away show her love? By saying, here, you take the easy way to die. Shoot our baby, and then yourself, and I will go away, and starve.

Or was it selfish to just take the easy way, and to die? Would it not have been more selfless to keep pushing on, with the hope of survival in a warmer area? To suffer more, so that your loved ones could have the possibility of having happiness and comfort? Or was the risk of harm, and the constant suffering too overwhelming for hope? Is there a point where you just shut down with so much stress, and just want to give up completely, and lose all hope that you ever had?

I couldn't possibly know the answer.

It is too far from my current situation. The warmth of my home, the nice hot tea and sweat pants, the food in my refrigerator, and the laughter of all of my siblings, all of my comfort. I think that the human mind can't possibly wrap itself around something that it has never even closely experienced. So, when given a situation like this, it doesn't really affect us very deeply. Sure, it might make us think a little bit, but we will go to bed, wake up, eat breakfast, and keep on going about our normal lives. But should we think about such possibilities at all?

This is way too depressing for me. Maybe for school, to analyze, pick apart piece by piece and discuss amongst my peers, it will be given a created point, an overall reason. But can it be beneficial for my being? Does it have some overall meaning that will affect my life? Or is just another one of those stories that is made to impress the human mind, distract it for a while, and then to be forgotten amongst the other pieces of Literature picked up here and there.