I’ve been seeing commercials lately where people with Alzheimer’s talk about how they were affected after they learned they were dying. It struck me as interesting that people seem to think that we’re not dying until we get diagnosed with some disease. Actually, we’re all “dying” – just at different rates. Each of us will eventually die. I find it intriguing that people seem to think that death is only something brought upon by disease, forgetting that we could come to an end at any point, whether or not there is a murderous disease that takes hold of us.
Why is it that people are only recognized as nearing death if there is some occurrence that speeds up our progression towards death at an “unnatural” rate? In fact, what’s to even determine what is natural? Perhaps how long we live is just how our body was meant to survive. I think we should be more aware of our mortality and learn that when people get a life-threatening disease, it’s not like one minute they weren’t dying and the next they were. In fact, the clock is ticking for us all, some just go faster than others, that’s all. I wonder how people would live their lives if they thought that way. There might just be fewer regrets, fewer missed opportunities as people try to navigate an uncertain life span.
Maybe it’s just semantics, but when people say “suddenly I was dying,” I always feel like bringing to their attention how that doesn’t actually make any sense. It assumes that you weren’t dying to begin with. Though it seems like a negative way to view the world, isn’t that exactly what living means? To be progressing towards death as well? That’s the way I see it anyway. And far from let is discourage me, I’ll let it motivate me to get things done with a little more urgency, since you never know when you might not be here anymore.
