Death is merely, a part of Life

One thing I will give cancer credit for, it forces you to see parts of your life you are happy to ignore up to that point. It makes you see life as it really is. Very few people will get cancer, of any kind, without the possibility that they are going to die crossing their mind.

In my case it was a lot more than a possibility. It was a virtual certainty. The likelihood of my death was the elephant in the room. And the room was very small. I knew my fight would be completely flawed if I was afraid to unturn the biggest stone of all. I had to deal with the possibility I was going to die, know I was not afraid, and turn that courage to my benefit to underpin my entire fight.

So for the first time in my life I seriously contemplated that I would not be here this time next week. And, for the first time, I seriously began to wonder if I wasn't here, where would I be.

Is this it!

Am I just to die and get buried and become a meal for the worms. Or will I return in a few days as a tree or a dog or another human being. Or is there a heaven and a hell, and if so, which one has been told to prepare for my imminent arrival. The likely possibility of your demise takes you to parts of your mind you rarely visit.

From the earliest days of my life I have observed people with faith. Without evaluating the details of what that faith entailed, I thought it was a good thing. I have seen older people especially, who, with the abilities of their body deserting them and almost appearing to be forgotten by society in general, derive great strength to keep going, through their faith. Their beliefs, even if they turned out to be untrue, were doing them good. Their faith was giving them motivation when the world that surrounded them no longer could, or would.

Faith allows you to tackle anything this world can throw at you because it allows you remove yourself from the world itself. It tells you that the answers you seek are not to be found here.

Many of my friends do not believe in God. As I looked at what I believed in, I wanted to view it from their perspective. I wanted to keep the argument as rational as I could. So I looked at the world as it was. I saw this amazing planet and its wonderful complexities of mountains and oceans and stars and volcanoes. Then I looked at the worlds we know beyond, the moon, the other planets, the sun and faraway galaxies. And pretty soon I came to a very simple, personal, conclusion.

We can't have made all this.

In the vast scale of the universe we inhabit we seem like little ants scurrying around on a daily basis. We are not strong. We get sick. The best of us make mistakes every day. The worst of us commit the most unimaginable atrocities.

In the world that I looked at I could see good men persevere through lives of hardship. And bad ones elevated to positions where they could dominate and control and destroy.

I believed there has to be something more.

It seemed to me to be just as rational to argue there is something greater as it is to say there is not. If it is crazy to believe in an after-life, it seems to be just as proportionally crazy, and even arrogant, to say there isn't one. All the evidence, all around us, seems to point to far more than we could ever be capable of.

Declaring that man is the be-all and end-all seems to me like saying the sun revolves around the earth. That was an absolute for a long time too.

So when I did look, the world that I saw generally fitted in with what I had been brought up to believe. Be a good person. Try and be a better person. Bring as much love and goodness to this world as you can.

Nobody could fault those aspirations, nowhere in the world. If we could all live by them the world would be a perfect place. But perfection is not for here. They are aspirations rather than absolutes. We are all flawed. The mission appears to be not, not to fail, but to keep trying after you fail. And to try to fail less often. Your conscious is your guide to how hard you have tried. Your faith is your inspiration to try again.

Faith, to me, is a very personal thing. It is as unique to you as your fingerprints or your personality. You and what you believe in. Religion can be a medium, but your faith is your own. I don't believe we have each been given a conscious without reason. It is your direct connection to whatever it is that you believe in.

It is also universal. The general principles don't change. A good person in the city is a good person in the jungle, or in the desert, or on the ice caps. And they haven't changed in 2000 years. A good person then is a good person today. The need to herd us all under different banners, with different rules and regulations, that has occurred in the intervening period, seems to have come a lot more from man, than it did from God.

So my faith became an essential part of my fight too. It was one of the few pieces of my armour that could withstand extreme pain, discomfort and despair. And it was the strongest part to see off even death itself.

It has remained in place as an essential element of my second life. It tries to guide me to do the best I can, as often as I can. It isn't always successful of course. But the most important thing is that it keeps me trying.

So when the day finally does come and I get to meet God, or an alien, or a talking spaceship, or just the worms, I will say that the only life I knew was that of a human being. I looked at the world around me and, using the judgement that had been trusted to me I believed there was more to life than power and wealth and impression. That the basic principles of right and wrong are the same for all, and known to all. I hope to say that I tried to live my life based on those assessments and tried to make the best decisions I could. I tried to do good rather than bad.

But I will also remind them that I am not God, or an alien, or a robot, or a worm. I am a human and therefore I am flawed. I will have made plenty of mistakes too. But every time I stumbled I hope to be able to say it didn't stop me continuing to climb the mountain. If I fell, I got up and carried on. And I resumed knowing the important thing was not how high you reached, but how well you climbed.

What happens next will be up to them ...............................!