“Who Wants To Live Forever?” (Life Separation Anxiety)

A dear friend of mine forwarded to me an article that was published in The Guardian under the title “Top five regrets of the dying” and requested my comments. Bronnie Ware is an Australian nurse who spent several years working in palliative care, caring for patients in the last 12 weeks of their lives. She recorded their dying epiphanies in a blog called Inspiration and Chai, which gathered so much attention that she put her observations into a book called The Top Five Regrets of the Dying.

Fist of all, the article made me sad. The focus of it is on the regrets people have “in the clearing, at the end of the path” as beautifully Stephen King put it when it comes to the end of one’s life in The Dark Tower - his Magnum Opus.

Surely people have positive thoughts at the end of the life as well. Or do they? Many have had their thoughts, feelings and fears of death incorporated in their creative works. In fact, I believe anyone who has ever created any piece of art has been equally concerned with death as with life.

As I see it, life is our memory of the past, our present (or the perception of it) and our hopes and dreams for the future. Death, on the other hand, is the state of past, present and future deficiency that creates the life separation anxiety in all of us of the unknown that expects us all. There, in the grey area between both worlds, religion, myth, dreams, nightmares, hopes and fears reside eternally. Both life and death in our realm subsist in a constant state of antagonism with varying degree of urgency, depending on our progress on the “path” of life towards death.

What contemporary people are missing, I believe, is the perception of the bridge between the life and death.

When on one side of it, on a small, elegantly written metal plate, one reads “Meaning”. This is the name of the bridge between life and death. Perhaps the same message is on another bridge - between death and life too.

The fear of change from one (more or less) known state of existence we call life, the desire to complete an uncompleted pilgrimage(s), regrets, chances lost, all we wished and we still wish for, make the passing to the other side (more indefinite than known) – death, hard to comprehend and to accept.

But life has no meaning without death and death has no meaning without the corresponding life. The whole meaning of life thus becomes death and vice versa.

Paulo Coelho, in his life exploratory work Veronika Decides to Die, vivisects one young woman’s desire to depart early from life to find the all powerful desire of most of us to stay in this world for a little longer. Some people must be "shocked" into wanting to live.  For others, the few remaining moments on the path are equally important as the whole journey in order to build their bridge with the name “Meaning” on it. 

The day before Apple announced Steve Jobs had passed away, the fact was confirmed that Steve worked on one of the newest products right until the very end.

In You Tube, under the video clip “Who Wants To Live Forever” for the movie Highlander by Queen, there is the top comment for the song by janzavec77 and it reads “this song tears your heart apart and it fills it with hope at the same time... “.

This is the essence of the bridge. One must dare to live… and to die. That was how the one who “dares to live forever” had built his own bridge and was able to have an eternal life with no regrets.