Live & Appreciate Your Life – it is always going to be too short

This is my comment response to Bill Howdle, an amazing man sharing his experiences of living and dying with the world – Dying mans daily journal.

Wow. I am stunned by your sharing and giving back so much to every person who writes to you with their experience. I aspire to the kind of amazingly positive impact on people that you have. It is your deep integrity, honesty, compassion and wisdom wrought in your struggle that shines through. You stand out in the blogging world and in the world at large as someone to be admired and listened to.

Your blog communicates the most important truth that a human can ever know. Life is precious above all, and too short (one year or a hundred years is too short). Every day I’m alive I am grateful for it, far more so since I nearly died after a motorcycle accident about 6 years ago. I am doubly grateful for the lives of my friends and family – my girlfriend was on the motorbike at the time, and miraculously escaped unharmed. Sadly we recently separated, but we remain friends.

It is so important to acknowledge one’s loved ones, to let them know how much you love them. I never know if I’m going to be killed by an out-of-control truck on my long drive home after work, or if the violent crime in South Africa will one day catch up with me or my loved ones. So many people die senselessly all the time, let alone those with diseases. Recently, my father’s half brother died and I was so priviledged to spend a few hours with him a month before he died. I didn’t know him closely, but spending some time with him meant the world to him and to me.

Similarly, I was priviledged to know for a brief time a gentleman who was dying from lung cancer. He fought it for 2 more years, and only in the final 2 months was he forced to stop his passion, golf, because of the extreme tiredness. The impression he made in the few days I spent with him will always remain with me.

I have a deep fear of dying. Actually, the fear is of pain. The much greater fear is of Endings. I’m afraid of everything coming to an abrupt end – all the opportunity to live life, to love, to experience, to share, to be loved – my greatest fear is the loss of that, of all that is human. I do not have a clear or strong sense of an afterlife, which I imagine must give some measure of relief to fear of the ultimate ending.

Life is magnified by the knowledge that everything can change or vanish in an instant. This is such a powerful realisation and it empowers me enormously. I pay such better attention to friends and family, and to what I do, and to my health, being acutely aware of how thin the thread of life is.