Terminal Station

I am in a situation now that I must concentrate on living my own life. Normally speaking, people live their lives according to their surroundings. Family, close friends, and work play a significant role in dictating your actions and decisions. This is inevitable if you want to live in harmony with everybody.

Normal, healthy people, can afford to invest a lot of time in maintaining a good balance in all their relationships. In my case, however, suffering from a serious illness and having a death sentence over my head, I don’t dispose of much time. If a normal, healthy person doesn’t worry too much with the future I, on the other hand, don’t even know if I will have any future at all.

In the beginning, it was quite a shock, and I felt very uncomfortable. It was not exactly fear of death, but a sort of emptiness and apathy that took over me. I’ve waited so long for my retirement to start, finally, doing all kinds of things and projects that I had on my mind... Suddenly, it was all irrelevant. How can you be motivated if you lost hope and don’t know how much time you have left?

This apathy was soon replaced by a sort of frenzy when I passed my days doing unpleasant things or tasks that I didn’t particularly like or wasn’t keen in doing. I felt miserable wasting my precious time in such way. For me, it was like throwing away my last chances of fulfilling my dreams. I became terribly depressed.

However, if we stop for a moment and think carefully, my situation is not much different from a normal person’s. Nobody truly knows how much longer they are going to live, even when they are healthy. I remember the case of a dear friend of mine, who died a horrible death, burned alive, when the airplane she was travelling, as a result of a bad landing, caught fire and exploded after hitting a warehouse at the end of the runway. She was in the late fifties, prosperous and healthy. She left a husband, a daughter and two stepchildren.

Nowadays, I even believe that I have a slight advantage over normal and healthy people in the sense that I refuse to waste any more of my time. When you are normal and healthy, you have the tendency of leaving certain things for tomorrow. It is the “retirement syndrome”: when I retire, I will do this and that, I will enjoy all kinds of things that are not at the top of my priorities right now. You want to be successful at work, and you don’t want to disappoint your family and friends. Work often becomes a limitation; family and friends become consumers of your time.

You end up postponing all the things you’d love to do for later, when you will have more time. Well, I don’t have any time, or rather, I don’t know how much more time I have. Therefore, I can’t afford to postpone anything. It’s now or never. I must live every day as if it is going to be my last day on earth. I must do everything I want now; I can’t wait.

But, if I think of my dear departed friend above, this decision of thoroughly enjoying my life every day that I am alive, would also apply to any human being, be this person healthy or not. I don’t mean here that we should drop all the responsibilities to our work, or neglect our friends and family. But we must meet a proper balance of our time in a manner that we are also able to fulfil some of our dreams.

The truth is that nobody knows what the future is going to be. If we choose to sacrifice our life in the hope that one day we’ll be able to relax and enjoy it, we are playing the Russian roulette. I’ve already been hit by a bullet, so I am going to try to relax and enjoy all the time that I still have. I’m retired, so I don’t have to worry with work any more. As far as family and friends, they will have to get used to the idea that I won’t be particularly interested in hearing about their problems. I have myself a bigger problem to deal with. I’m still here, to love and care for them, but much more in a passive way than before.

Am I being selfish? Perhaps, but I don’t have much choice. A famous writer - I can't remember his name at this moment - once compared life with a long voyage by train. He said that, most of the time, we unfortunately fail to pay attention to the beautiful landscapes we are crossing on our way to the terminal station (death). And this is true: people are usually so busy with themselves that they forget to look around.

I need to be busy with myself because of my actual condition. But I am now one stop before the terminal station, and I intend to pay a lot of attention to the landscape before reaching it...