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On Accepting Death as Part Of Living
Death doesn’t mean that a life has been cut short; it is just a transformation into something else
Someone I admired and respected from afar died last week of cancer. Below is the response he gave when he was asked about his perception of mortality before and after his diagnosis with cancer. I am glad that he shared his thoughts with us before he took his last breath.
Something very important is that when you have cancer the idea of death is near, and so it doesn’t surprise, unlike you who is healthy, but death could be coming in the next minute or tomorrow morning.
Cancer scares the shit out of many of us. And to be honest, any terminal illness is scary. I am not sure if we get scared because we are facing death, or we get scared because of the pain we will go through if we fall ill, or maybe both. But I think the idea that an illness will lead to death is what scares us the most.
Even if death in itself is not physically painful, how we get there is what many of us are afraid of.
Depending on your age or the number of loved ones you’ve lost, your perception of death is likely to…
