People think that those with terminal illnesses develop some special insight into the meaning of life. Maybe...your thinking is certainly different than it used to be. There is a different thought process that occurs when you think you no longer have an unlimited amount of time to live. You no longer feel like you'll have plenty of time to fix that relationship or make the hard choices that are easier to avoid You accept that not all things in life work out the way you had hoped. You wonder why you had to go through some things that don't connect to any thing else in your life, lessons learned that will never be used or experiences that produced no moral. Even though I've gotten to do some spectacular things in my life, there is a sad feeling of "is that all there is?" The future years always carried the promise of everything the present and past lacked. The expectations of everything all the previous days promised if I just worked hard enough, dissolved. My life is just what it was, nothing more. It hit me that the highs e.g. going to Notre Dame, studying in Rome for 9 months, getting my Master's and Doctorate and mostly having Nicki and David were surrounded by a lot of mediocrity. I should have tried to live more in the moment instead of always working so hard I never had the energy or time to enjoy life. I shouldn't have settled as often as I did. I should have had higher self-esteem and waited for what I really wanted. I should have had the balls to go to grad school instead of getting married. There are a lot of shoulda, woulda, couldas but hindsight is 20/20.
What's really sad is that there seems to be no point. What happens to everything you learn while going through life? Even if there is reincarnation you don't remember anything in the next life (unless you are Shirley McClain). If there is life after death, I imagine that it will be very different from life on earth. The amount of time and effort required to take care of a body will be reduced to nothing. How will time be measured? Will I be able to see my kids, parents and husband? What will I do all day? We all assume we are going to Heaven but the Bible is filled with warnings about how narrow the path to Heaven is. What if I didn't make the cut?
Pascal's argument that you have a 50/50 chance of life after death so you should choose to go with the option that benefits you most i.e. life after death. The problem with that is that choosing to go with a belief does not bestow true belief. There are times when I am not sure I really believe. But I have spent the majority of my 60 years acting as if there is a God and that's a hard habit to break. When everything falls apart, my prayers are genuine and I believe that someone is listening. Am I just talking to myself? Does believing in God just make things easier? It's easy to worship in church when surrounded by other people who do and say things that support your belief. It is harder to believe when you are sitting in a doctor's office and someone tells you you have Stage IV cancer.
Maybe that special insight into the meaning of life comes when, for the first time, you have to acknowledge that your life is going to end and the lives of others will go on without you. All hopes and dreams that belonged to the future disappear. You realize that your life was your daily routine or as John Lennon put it "Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans." Life loses its mystery and promise, it is what it is and it was what it was.
I don't really know what to do with my time if I only have a few years to live. I have no idea what the process of dying will be like. I assume that there will come a point when the cancer will no longer react to the chemo or the chemo will become so toxic to my organs that something will fail. I guess you just wait then until the cancer renders something vital unusable. Its weird to think of just waiting for something to fail. I never though a stroke or heart attack would look good. I want something quick. I don't want to be at the mercy of a slow disease. The loss of control is the most frightening. The only insight I have into the meaning of life is that it goes on whether or not you are here.
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