The Tribune

By Dr. Kenneth D. Kemp

THERE'S a peculiar clarity that descends on people when they receive a terminal diagnosis.

The noise of daily life, the petty grievances, the social posturing, the endless accumulation of things, all fall away with startling speed. What remains, stripped bare, is almost always the same truth in all its splendour: knowing what really matters in life.

In an instant, the idea of success, so firmly planted in our mind before, looks radically different.

In today’s report, I wanted to revisit their deep insight of what truly matters when time is running short.

As a physician, I’ve occasionally had the privilege of being the shoulder a patient leans on, hearing what patients say when they know the end is closer than the beginning. It’s one of the strangest and most humbling things in medicine. You expect people to talk about legacy, success, status or accomplishments, but they almost never do. They talk about family, one more Christmas, or just one more dinner around the table with their children.

Case in point, I once had an elderly patient tell me that he’d pay any price and bear any burden for one more Saturday with his wife.

Not a trip to Paris.

Not a yacht.

Not some grand adventure.

Just one more ordinary Saturday.

When Steve Jobs was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and began confronting the possibility of his death, he didn’t lament unfinished products or market share. In his poignant 2005 Stanford commencement address delivered one year after his diagnosis, he said that death is the great eliminator of other people’s expectations, of pride, of fear, or embarrassment. It clears the board.

Because when you strip away the noise, people never regret what they did, they almost always regret with aching precision what they didn’t do.

Former US senator from Nebraska Ben Sasse refers to death as ‘a wicked thief’ because death steals the things we often take for granted. It steals graduations, retirement plans, anniversaries, birthdays, Sunday dinners, and quiet Tuesday afternoons. Tatiana Schlossberg wrote movingly about what she feared losing most. It was not status or career ambition. It was the small things. Holding her children. Bedtime stories. Bath time. Being able to care for them with her own hands.

Strangely, the people staring death in the face often become the best teachers of life. When people know they are running out of time, they stop lying. They stop pretending that they love the jobs that make them miserable. They stop pretending they are happy in relationships that drain them. They stop worrying so much about what strangers think. Nobody on their deathbed wishes they had spent more time answering emails, sitting in traffic, or attending meetings that should have been half as long. No one ever says I wish I had one more day at the office when they’re on their deathbed.

But that’s the thing about people who are dying. They remind us that life is not built on grand moments nearly as much as it’s built on ordinary ones.

We spend our healthiest years chasing the extraordinary while often overlooking the everyday things that truly matter. We tell ourselves we’ll call and apologize to our friends tomorrow, slow down next week, take the trip next summer. Then next month becomes next year. Next year becomes five years. Then five years becomes never.

Suddenly we look around and wonder where the time went.

From the time we are children, we are programmed with a kind of bucket-list mentality. Walk by a certain age. Read by a certain age. Graduate by a certain age. Get married, buy the house, have children, take a trip, retire comfortably. Happiness and a better life are always in the future. There’s a saying that life has to be lived forward, but it only makes sense in reverse. The dying teach us that the best parts of life were never the milestones.

They were the ordinary days in between.

Hospice and palliative care workers have long observed that dying people tend to share the same regrets. They wish they had lived more truthfully. They wish they had worked less. They wish they had stayed close to old friends. They wish they had expressed their feelings more openly. They wish they’d never surrendered their own desires to the gravitational pull of other people’s ideas about who they should be. Most of all, they wish they had allowed themselves to be happier. As if happiness had been standing there knocking on the front door all along and they were too distracted, too anxious, too busy, too scared or too proud to answer.

Most of us are sleep-walking through life and we live as though life is a dress rehearsal. We act as though the real living will begin once the kids are older, once work settles down, once the mortgage is smaller, once we lose 10 pounds, once the business grows, once we finally feel ready. People spend most of their lives trying not to think about death. But the irony is that many people near the end of their life spend their final days teaching the rest of us how to live.

So, listen when they tell us that life is not a dress rehearsal. We’re already living the play.

Most of life is laundry, traffic, errands, work, dishes, school runs, sucking our teeth when the electricity goes off and trying to figure out why the wi-fi stopped working for no apparent reason. Yet those ordinary days often become the very things we miss most. The distinct smell of rain on a cloudy day. A laugh at the dinner table. Singing to music during a drive home. Enjoying a freshly-picked mango while walking the dog or standing knee-deep in the sea. A child asking you to play for five more minutes. A spouse reaching for your hand. A phone call from a friend. The dying remind us that these are not interruptions to life.

They are life.

Even in hospital rooms and chemotherapy suites and hospice beds, the dying still speak about love. They still speak about family, gratitude, and forgiveness. They still believe there is something worth waking up for tomorrow. And perhaps that’s why there is still something hopeful in all of this.

So, call the friend. Book the trip. Leave work a little earlier. Sit outside. Take the picture then put the phone down. Tell someone you love them.

We don’t have to wait for a diagnosis to inherit this wisdom. The dying have been ever so generous with their advice. Stop waiting for the perfect time to live your life, because there may never be one.

Like the famous Herrick poem states, ‘gather ye rosebuds while ye may’ because the ordinary moments we rush through today may very well become the memories we miss the most.