July 1, 2008

• dying? so what if you are

  thinking… thinking…

  what if you were dying? 

  yeah yeah we’re all dying. but I mean what if you knew or strong suspected that you only had a distinct limited amount of time left to reside in this world. Say you’re terminally ill or could glimpse into the future and see the exact date of your death.

  What would you do then? How would you lead your life differently? What would you care about? Who would you tell? How would you cope with that knowledge?

  Right now, most of us, just assume we’ll live until our old age. Well maybe we might say we’re probably not going to live to be that old, but we still live as if we were. We make choices as if we’re always going to be here to follow through on them and see the outcomes. Although we are finite, we often act as if thanks to our ignorance we’re infinite.

  But if you were forced to face the finite nature of your existence would it change you? Would you be the same person afterward?

  I think it depends a lot on the duration.

  If you only have a matter of days or weeks to live I think it’d be easy. You just stop sleeping. Stop waiting. Stop stalling. Stop thinking. And just start DOING for the rest of your days.

  You can just throw all inhibitions to the wind and say to hell with everything. Sell everything you own. Go on trips around the world. Write your memoirs. Eat all your favorite foods. Go to all your favorite places. Tell everyone you’ve ever known exactly what you think about them and all the things you’ve always held in before. Give people all the advice your modest lifetime of wisdom has brought about.

  Break the rules. Rule the day. Spend every moment living your life to the fullest. That’s what you do if you only have a short time.

  After all it doesn’t really matter right? In a few weeks you won’t be here. Go ahead and tell everyone you’re dying. In fact announce it the world why not? Cry out: “I’m dying! Party on ME!”  And you just try to have fun. Try to find whatever joy and meaning you can in those oh so brief days.

  That’s one scenario. But what if you knew you were dying but it was a long way off, say 15 years, 20, or 25. What then? 

  I think that’d be almost as easy. I mean in that time frame you can basically do virtually anything anybody else can do. You can be successful. You can get rich. You can fall in love half a dozen times. You can have children and raise them to or near adulthood. You can change the world. You can maybe even be president. Sure you might miss out on being a grandparent and a great grandparent and you might miss out on retiring but for the most part you have the freedom to live a full life without feeling that anything was left undone.

  What’s more with that much time, who knows right? Maybe your terminal disease will get cured. Maybe you’ll get rich enough to be able to afford some sort of treatment that stems it off and gives you a few more years. Or maybe you find a way to avoid whatever impending disaster you foresee causing your demise. In any case there’s no reason to rush or worry about anything particularly. You might live your life a little more intensely knowing that it will be a relatively short one. But you’d still be able to *live* your life.  No problem. The knowledge would always be there in the background but you can sort of forget about it for the most part, if you let yourself.

  In this case you could tell people or not as it won’t really matter. Most people won’t be able to really grasp the idea that you’ll be gone that far along the line. They’ll treat you as they usually do, except perhaps occasionally being a little sad as melancholy hits them. They might be a little bit nicer to you though, or maybe not if they try hard not to be. But mostly life would proceed as normal.  You have plenty of time to teach them not to pity you.

  The worst case is the case where you are between these two extremes. That I think would be hardest. What if you only had three to five years left to live? What then? 

  I think that’d be hard. Almost impossibly hard. You’d have just enough time to try and strive but not enough time to know the ultimate results. You’d have enough time to do things one way but not enough time to fail and try again and again until you succeed. Everything would feel like it’s a rush. It’d be like you were in a race against time trying to achieve as much of that complete life as you possibly can during your brief life span.

  The instinct to just stop and give up and say to hell with it all would be very strong I think. But then what? 5 years is too long to bum around comfortably. You pretty much have to keep striving or be miserable. So maybe you end up being miserable while striving for things you probably won’t ever be able to have.

  But the worst part would be, I think, the question about whether to tell people about it. If you told people that could influence their every interaction with you. Their every decision with regards to you might be partially driven by that knowledge that you aren’t going to be there in 5 years. And that’s something I think I would *hate*. I wouldn’t be able to stand the thought of people pitying me. I wouldn’t be able to stand the fact that I have to second guess every act of kindness and benevolence or generosity and wonder if they are only doing it because I was dying? During my days left I’d want people to treat me and know me as myself, not as “someone who is dying”.

  So I’d tell no one. I’d do all that I could to make sure nobody knew about it until the last minute.  I’d live with that knowledge buried within me. I’d keep everyone out and pretend like nothing is wrong.

  And I think… that would be really very lonely. 

  But maybe I’m too cynical. You *could* still do a lot during 3-5 years. You can make many friends. You can make good friends. True friends that will always be there for you. You can resolve conflicts and solve problems that you had set aside. You could have fun experiences. You can do a good job and be moderately successful. You can learn from people and teach people and help people. You could still fall in love. You could still be happy, most of the time. That knowledge of your impending demise might always be there in the back of your mind threatening to overwhelm you, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still *live* in spite of it.  You can tell that future to go to hell and live your life today as best you can. In that sense, you don’t have to be any different from anyone else.

  And most important of all, I think you can appreciate all of those good things more than those who don’t know their end is coming. That’s true I think of anyone who is dying regardless of the time frame. If you are cognizant and aware of this fact, you can feel more connected to the world and your life. Everything can mean more to you.

  Buried in the depths of Plato’s dialogs there is a concept of levels of happiness. The idea he tries to exert is that happiness that derives only from your desires or only from your courage is a lesser kind of happiness to the deeper kind you get when your wisdom and your courage and your desires are all in line, all in balance. The truer happiness than base pleasure can only be derived from the knowledge of the Good, from being Good.

  If there are levels of happiness, deeper and realer happiness. I wonder if not a true realization that your time is short wouldn’t enable you to have a truer happiness day by day than those of us who live a life pretending to be infinite and end up sleep walking through our lives unable to truly grasp what’s important…

  Dying or no, we’re all the same really. All of us trying to find out how to live our lives to the fullest and to find the deepest happiness we can achieve.  And maybe we can all just keep helping each other do that.

  • 10:11 am
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