A few years ago a close friend and co-worker died of cancer (lets call him J). For four years I watched J struggle and fight melanoma as it spread through his body. He was a very big man, active, and had led an interesting life.
His death made me re-evaluate quite a bit in my life. It was not because of his death itself - I've experienced that a few times at this point in my life. No, it was because of his life just prior to his death.
When he was not in the hospital nearly dying from chemotherapy or radiation, he was at work slumped over his desk, pale as a ghost, with the stink of death coming from him. He did this every day (and I'm guessing on the occassional weekend) from the day he was diagnosed until just a couple days before he died.
Oddly enough I had another co-worker (who was also a good friend of J's) die not long before J did, except it was lung cancer. He called in sick with pneumonia - he came back into work for a day, then two days later he was dead. He was an incredibly heavy smoker and, judging by the things he said and were said about him, he did not live a very clean life. His age was about 50. I was secretly hoping this would wake up J, but it didn't, in fact if anything he was in the office even more than his normal 60+ hour weeks.
How one dies does not matter in the end, its how we approach it that does. In that sense, we are all steadily walking each day closer to our death. That seems unnecessarily morbid but its been on my mind a lot recently.
J was a stubborn bastard who was given 6 months to live and managed to stretch it out to 4 years. At first I admired that he was strong and coming to work, but then I realized one day the man was rich by just about anyone's standards. He could have taken his wife and run off to just about any place in the world - but he chose to work.
In my mind he suddenly went from "trying to provide as much for his wife as possible before he dies" to "he's hiding from his wife's pain and he's hiding from the fact that he's going to die soon."
Now, if he had founded the company or had a personal pet project he was fostering to life, I almost would have understood, but he was working on a menial project and the end result of all his years of struggling as he was dying resulted in some nice pretty certification logos being printed on the side of a box, which was only sold for a year before being thrown away.
I guess we all want to feel like what we do is making a difference, and that no matter how trivial it is we'll feel like we've made a contribution.
There are no second chances to do things right and we typically only get one shot at making a choice. Time is a waterfall, slowly running off the edge of the universe, and its current is too powerful to even think about swimming upstream, its hard enough just to turn and look back sometimes. We're trapped on this life-raft and one day we'll fall off the edge.
After watching J be a bastard to his wife, inconvenience his co-workers, and make me pick up after him for years, I came to a serious conclusion. I kept expecting him to die every day at his desk, he was just that sick. And each day he came back - but who knows when our trip on this boat will end? Each day he surprised me, and when he finally died it came as a shock, even though I had been expecting it nearly every day for four years.
I determined at that time that I would never say this: "I need more time! I haven't written the things I wanted, seen the places I wanted to go, spent time with loved ones that I needed, and I haven't said the things I'm feeling to let the people in my life know how important they are."
Well, if I died tomorrow I might still say that but it would not be for lack of trying. I laugh, I cry, I do my best, and I let myself love. I'm not scared of feeling pain, and even though I live most of my life in pain I do my best to still allow myself to love and lose.
The arrow will pierce your heart one day and you'll go with it over the edge of the universe, hopefully you are living your life in such a way that you would have no regrets if the edge found you tomorrow.
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