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.
