Two years. Six months. The first is how long I spent believing I was going to die…the very next month. The latter’s how long the doctor’s gave me to live to begin with. I’m still here. I didn’t die. Or did I? I was broken wide open, stripped down naked, face to face with the inferno and the light. I wasn’t spiritually reborn–something greater, better, and truer happened. I learned a few tiny things.
So here are a few things almost dying taught me.
Fear of death is for the living, not the dying.
Most of us spend most of our lives afraid of death. Dreading the day, the minute, the hour. Not of passing. But of knowing. Of diagnosis, illness, decrepitude…finality. The point of no return.
When the doctors told me I was going to die, I was alone. I spent three sleepless nights, curled up on a giant sofa, suffering. And then something like a preternatural calm settled over me like a great blue sky. It’s not that I rationalized away my terrible fear. It’s that it dissipated, evaporated, like a summer thunderstorm, somehow–not through any conscious iron will or heroic doing of my own, but merely naturally. It existed at a deeper level, after all, than anything I had control over, after all.
Why? Let me try and explain. The calm I felt wasn’t merely the calm of certainty–neither of death, nor of salvation. Nor was it the calm of relief–resolution, closure, inescapability. It was a calm of a different kind altogether. The trivialities of meaningless things suddenly became clear. And the meaning of the things that truly mattered lit up like neon. Love, grace, truth, beauty, rebellion. All this, all these–even one more day of these would be enough. It was the calm of being at home in the world at last.
I was startled, of course, to hear that I was dying. But I was truly surprised to find out that once the issue was settled, once there was no going back, no appeal, no mercy, there was also nothing that fear could operate grimly upon. Because, like most people, I had expected to be agonized, paralyzed, wracked by fear. But the truth is that the certainty of death, once it comes, does not wear a monster’s mask. It does not hold the reaper’s scythe. It shines a light. On what life is, means, holds, signifies.
The fear of death is for the living, not the dying. When the hour is upon you, fear will leave you. The only thing that fear itself is afraid of is death. Knowing that, therefore, the more of our brief lives that we spend dreading death, the more time we are simply wasting. There is no need to fear the terrible dread of dying. The soul is stronger than the mind knows.
Dying well is as great a challenge as living well.
We are coming, as a society and culture, to a more sophisticated understanding of what living well, eudaimonia, means. Not just yachts and designer bed linens, but meaning, purpose, vitality, health–all the great and miraculous things that compose human potential.
But we do not yet understand what dying well means.
So let me explain. Dying well is not just dying with dignity, choice, freedom, respect. Though it certainly begins therein. Dying well is greater, wider, truer: it means something like not spending one’s days afraid of death. It means being free of our deep, buried, hidden anxieties of death, our dread of finality, our fear of an ending to us.
The truth is that those fear corrupt us in profound ways. They lead us to make terrible, destructive choices–which destroy not just our potential, but the lives of people that we love. We may leave our lovers for prettier ones, we may sell our souls for a few more dollars, we may betray our friends and partners and children–all because we fear that we must squeeze in one more morsel of life before it is all over, finished, gone, vanished.
Dying well is the ability to face one’s death not just with grim courage–but with gentle laughter, wisdom, compassion, gratitude. I know. It sounds irrational, against all our ideas of what is reasonable, desirable, sensible. Why should one be grateful to…die? But that, of course, its the measure of how deeply embedded death anxiety is in us. We are socialized to believe that death is “bad”, life is “good”–and thus we grow imbalanced, unaware, fragile–ever easily manipulated by those who promise a little more life, at any price. And yet. The truth is so simple that we do not even see it. One must be grateful for death if one is to find a home in being.
Let me explain.
One must be as grateful to death as one is to life.
Fight death with all your might, rage and curse at it, stand athwart it with sword and shield. Death will laugh at you. How then do you find a sense of being at home in this life…where there is an enemy so great you cannot even get near enough to place a finger upon it? You can spend your life enraged by it…terrified of it…bitter at the injustice of it. Most of us do.
But the true challenge that each and every one of us has is this. We must make peace with our great enemy. How? Death, too, brings us great gifts. Not merely freeing us from the burdens of the world: release, relief, ending. Nor merely does it paint the days we have left with more vivid colors. And nor merely does it free the world from the burden of us. There is a greater gift still that we death offers us.
That gift isn’t salvation. Though perhaps there is a heaven–who knows? The greatest gift death offers us is redemption. A sense that our lives have been worthy of living in the first place. Not merely in our own narrow terms–but in the largest terms we may imagine. They must be worthy–to our families, communities, societies, perhaps all humanity. All those who have supported, nurtured, cared for, lifted us. It is then that we gain a sense that we are finally even; and being even, we are at last whole, complete, true. We are redeemed. Only death can give us this greatest gift–and it is this gift, and this gift alone, which underpins our humanity. It alone allows us to create things as necessary yet superficial as social order, law, institutions–and as profoundly mysterious and transformative as rebellion, defiance, grace, and love.
I didn’t die. That’s a story for another time. But of all the things that have happened in my life, from writing books to traveling the world to making money, almost dying is the second best thing. Not just because I “beat” it. The truth is that I didn’t. It broke me wide open. And that is precisely how it began turning me into the person I was meant to be. Not by the gods, the fates, or by vengeance. But by love, necessity, and possibility.
Umair Haque Diary 