I Should be dead. According to many doctors, I’m over my expiration date by a couple of years. Here are a few thoughts about death that I haven’t read anywhere and keep thinking about.
Think about how you want to be found when you die.
Any of us can go at any second. I thought cancer was going to kill me like the doctors said. They said I had months to live (even though it didn’t feel that way). The cancer treatments were tough but doable. But then a known side effect led me to seek additional medical help. Hours later I was pretty much dead. It can happen fast, even when you think you’re going to have a slow death from cancer. Other ways can be even faster, like a car accident or even something small like a slip-and-fall. For instance, a friend of a friend who was fit and young, one Sunday morning went into the hospital with leg pain. It turned out she had an infection in her leg that had already turned into sepsis and she passed away only hours after being admitted. The point is – death isn’t something you usually plan.
Take a second and walk through your life as if you were somebody else and you’ve passed on. What do you find? How organized are you? What would you want your family to find? This includes a lot of things, like are your pictures organized AND accessible? Are passwords for computers, phones, banking, etc. somewhere that someone you trust can access? Is a will set up?
When I nearly died, I got to look at my life through someone else’s eyes, after the hospital, my home didn’t feel like my home, it felt foreign, and I felt like I was intruding on someone else’s life. It was weird to look at my life through those eyes. My family was asking me all these questions about passwords, bills, and maintenance just to keep things going. I got a lot of late fees from payments not made while I was out of it and spent a lot of time trying to get everything resolved. Similarly, Annalisa’s father died with all his passwords unknown to anyone and they had to get a lawyer involved for a lot of things, but I don’t think they were ever able to access his computer fully. Not leaving access is just a pain for those who remain.
So, I started going through all my stuff after my experience. I now try to think through these scenarios more and apply them every day. Passwords are now in an obvious place -plus my daughter seems to know most of them anyway. She thinks it’s a fun game to know my passwords. I organized memories. I had some VHS tapes from the late 90s and early 2000s that had dating, marriage, and our kids as babies. All that likely would have been tossed if I died because they were poorly labeled and in a box with some recorded stuff from TV. I also went through all the Mini DV tapes and transferred them. Plus, tons of pictures were all over the place on different computers. I organized them all into one place with a separate backup. I don’t think it’s fair to leave those that remain a total mess.
That said, I got to the part where I started throwing away everything personal and then stopped. Organized is good, but a completely sterile life is probably too far.
Ask yourself what you’d want to accomplish if you had a year to live.
I was given between 4-6 months to live, yet I’m still here over 2 years later. After all of it, I realized that what was important to me were two things—trying to communicate life lessons for my kids while I had time, both in person and in writing. The other was trying to complete some personal goals and projects that would be fulfilling to me. So the question is, do you have similar things that you want to do or communicate if you only had a year to live?
From birth, we are put on the clock. We don’t have forever. I think it’s good to remind ourselves that there is an end, and it could be in a year or decades. Whatever you would want to say to your kids – just say it. Whatever you would want to accomplish, stop procrastinating and do a little bit each day toward that goal.
Don’t be afraid of the pain of death.
If you’ve ever had a really bad illness or injury and felt like you’re going to die, good news… kind of. Dying isn’t THAT much worse than the times you’ve been really sick or hurt and were thinking “I’m going to die!”.
With my cancer, the treatments nearly did me in. It was so bad that an ambulance had to be called to take me to UVRMC. Then at UVRMC (not a small hospital), I was worked on a bit and they decided it was too much and flew me up to the U. That was followed by surgery where sedatives and anesthesia were deemed too risky to use because I was so close to death. The surgeon’s comment was my pain level was already at a 10 and he assumed I was already passed out. But I was aware, like some kind of sleep paralysis, just in total darkness. But, yes, I could hear and feel everything. Eventually, I did leave the body and I had a whole near-death experience with a door of light, but it was mostly darkness. The team that worked on me was pretty amazing. I’ve been told stories of family and friends who went in for scheduled surgery with various conditions and died on the operating table when just one of the issues I had happened by accident or just popped up during the operation. So, yeah, pretty amazing. Anyway, the operation was followed by months of recovery. Then I’ve had two other times where sepsis (see above story about leg infection) from the chemo treatments nearly did me in. Both times the doctors said the sepsis was too far along to save me. So yeah, I’ve had some pretty real experiences with death and pain.
After all that I can tell you honestly – If you’re afraid of the pain from dying, it’s really not that much worse than the worse you’ve ever felt. It seems the body can only tolerate so much pain and apparently we skirt that line quite a bit. Some will be lucky and die in their sleep or so quickly that it doesn’t even register. But even in cancer, just know, that you’ve already likely tolerated some pretty crazy pain and death won’t be that much worse.
Live your dream and don’t worry about other’s dreams.
Life is the dream. death is eternal.
One thing I often hear is, oh that person is wasting their life doing x. Here’s some news, no matter what you do with your life, someone thinks you are wasting your life. Just live your life. If others choose to live their life differently, that’s totally ok.
Many people think only they know the answer to a satisfying life. Truth is, when you go through death, you realize how short life really is. In the grand scheme, it’s like going on a week-long vacation to someplace like Hawaii. When people go to Hawaii, is it all beach? No. You get people who sit on the beach, surf, snorkel, scuba dive, hike the mountains, bathe in waterfalls, go to the pineapple plantations, visit the Pearl Harbor Memorial, ascend Kilauea, or go to the Polynesian cultural center among other activities. Not everybody does the same things and that’s ok. The same goes for life in general. Everyone has their own dreams, let others live their dreams and stop acting like everyone has to live according to your dream. If anything, you’ll likely find even more fulfillment by opening yourself up to others’ dreams.
Here’s the thing about life, if someone you know likes to eat and isn’t in the best shape, if that’s what they enjoy, let them be. If someone wants to read all day and is always lost in books and that is how they want to dream, it’s fine. If someone wants to spend their days chasing athletic highs, so be it. As long as society can function and the next generation is not born into a total nightmare. Let everyone else have their dreams.
You focus on you.
Keep in mind that what you think is so important right now, will be completely forgotten in 5 years. In 50 years, no one will care about anything you did with your life. In 100 years, no one will likely care that you even existed except a few certain family members, and even then, only fleetingly. In 200 years, you’re a face and picture in genealogy. In 1000 years, probably nothing will remain.
It’s not meant to be depressing. It just means, that in a thousand years, no one will care how you led your life because they will be living theirs, so why do you care how others choose to live their life now? No one person’s dreams hold any more value than any other person’s dreams because the only value in life is what we give it. Live how you want to live, enjoy the journey. Live your dream and be happy for others and how they choose to live theirs.
Keep calm and carry on.
Life can feel hectic and high-stress. Things happen that wreck plans. People hurt you.
Whatever happens in life, realize that whatever plans you have for life can be taken away at any moment and it’s ok. We are all going to have our plans taken away eventually – No matter how rich or poor. There comes a point where you are going to have to put your cards down and walk away from the table. All your things, all your money will be left.
For me, I often felt like things would be forever. But that’s just not the case, life feels like a long time until it’s not. When I came back from the hospital, I had lost all feeling of ownership, and possession. I didn’t care. It took months to even start to care again. I now try to enjoy life as it is and not care so much about things that it disrupts the feeling of calm. Life is about the journey, the every day, the struggles, AND the achievements.
Just remember, life isn’t forever. We’re playing in someone else’s sandbox and eventually, we’re all going home. So don’t get too worked up if something happens to your sandcastle, it’s just a sandcastle.
