HOW DO YOU WRITE ABOUT YOUR DEATH, WHEN YOU ARE STILL ALIVE

I appreciate my demise is a regular topic of my writing. Maybe I feel I am one of a few people still alive with some experience of the subject. My diagnosis was so severe that the greatest likelihood of all was that I was going to die. That was the elephant in the room. And the room was very small. By comparison, any chance of staying alive appeared to be about the size of a fly. And that was just the cancer. The two bouts of meningitis and deep vein thrombosis I got during my treatment should definitely have sealed the deal.

So I simply had to deal with the likelihood of dying. My death was staring me in the face. If I was to fight, my fight would only be as strong as its weakest link. I couldn't afford to have even one chink in my armour. My cancer would simply find it and devour me through it.

The mainstay of my fight to stay alive had to be that I was not afraid to die. When I went to the very precipice of my life I needed to be not afraid to peer over.

To assist my preparations, I went looking for some reading material on the subject of "dealing with dying". I couldn’t find any. There were plenty of articles on debt management, but nothing on death management.

But debt won’t kill you. Your death will.

Part of the problem is that all of the experts in the field are sadly no longer with us to pass on the benefit of their experience. On this side of dying, there is very little information available. So maybe it is useful that I prompt people to contemplate this huge, inevitable event that most of us spend our lives trying to ignore. It is a topic that naturally, we are all very slow to embrace. We have it scheduled it in for some time in the distant future, but we're far too busy for it just now.

But we are all going to die. And deep down we all know we live in a world where people die every day from the ages of one day, to 115 years old. Death is simply a huge part of life.

So although a lot of what I have written since my cancer survival has concerned the fight I put up to stay alive and the great perspective and appreciation I have ever since, none of that would have happened if I had not made myself strong enough to fight to survive. And a huge cornerstone of that was that I was not afraid to die. I took the biggest card cancer held against me out of it's hand. It had no hold on me after that. If you are not afraid to die, there is nothing left to be afraid of.

Then, when I did look into the abyss, I was surprised to find it was not quite what I was expecting.

The more I tried to look at the possibility of my imminent death, the more my mind wouldn't allow me to see it in a negative way. Rather than try to see the part of my life that was now about to be denied to me, it only made me see and appreciate the amazing life I had up to that point all the more. The more I tried to see the part of my glass that was half empty, the more it became obliterated by the part that was half full.

So rather than mourn the part of my life that was not to extend beyond 40 years, my mind would only let me appreciate all of the life I had up until then. It insisted I saw, for the first time, all of the people in the world who hadn’t even got close to 40. The 3 year old with leukemia, the 17 year old in the car accident, the 25 year old suicide victim. The young people who leave home every day only to never be seen again. None of them would ever have anything like the life I had just had.

But it didn't stop there. The next thing it did was show me all the people who would live twice as long as me but never have anything like a life like mine. The child soldier, the trafficked sex worker, the oppressed factory worker, the people in every country all over the world whose entire lives are blighted by illness or violence or poverty or hunger or oppression. They could all live to 80, but never have anything close to the 40 years I had.

So contemplating the likelihood of my death only transformed into becoming another powerful force in the appreciation of my life. It became an unexpected ally to my determination to fight to keep that life alive. I had thought that thinking about my death would be a weakness, only now to discover that, if it was to happen, I was at ease with it. Until then I would fight with everything within me to stay alive but I had no fear. Consequently, my fight only became all the stronger. I had dealt with my Achilles Heel. It was a huge turning point for me.

We should really all just deal with the fact we are going to die, put it away and then use it as a amazing platform to live all the more.

The other major consequence of considering your death is it will automatically prompt you to wonder what happens next.

Apart from any spiritual belief, I have also always looked at the earth in a very practical way. When I looked at the earth around me I saw oceans and mountains and great deserts and rivers and volcanoes. I saw the sun that just happens to rise every day and the stars in the sky and I could only imagine the vastness of the planets and galaxies that lay beyond. And pretty soon I came to a very simple, personal conclusion - we can't have made all this. Most of us can't even make a decent cup of coffee. How could we have put the amazing complexity of this incredible earth together.

Then as the human beings on that earth we are all flawed. We get sick, we get tired, we get old. The best of us make mistakes every day. The worst of us commit unimaginable atrocities.

There simply has to be something greater than us.

I also realized I couldn't explain earthquakes or droughts or tsunamis or illness or man killing his fellow man. But somehow I believed there has to be an explanation for them. Logic must prevail. One day, everything has to make perfect sense. We are all too complex, and have come too far, for that not to be the case. As I looked my death in the face, all of this was now no longer a spiritual belief, but had become a practical realization.

Then I looked at all of us. We are all different, which is wonderful, but yet we have much in common too. No matter who we are, where we come from, or what our race, religion or creed is, we all still have common,simple, almost animalistic instincts. We all want shelter, and food, and comfort, and family, and happiness and the greatest of all, love. We have an inherent natural law beyond any doctrine or indoctrination. We see creatures in the remainder of the animal kingdom look after their own kind. So we know it is wrong to kill. Sheep don't kill sheep. A good man in the desert will be the same good man in the city. And a bad man in the office will also be a bad man in the jungle.

So I believe whoever did make the sun and the stars and the mountains and the volcanoes can only be a source of good and love, because that is the natural instinct in all of us. Our role therefore, must surely be to live under those terms. Be the best people we can be, living the best lives we can, as often as we can. If we keep trying to do that, we are in keeping with what we see around us. Nobody can ask much more. 

By now I had the Grim Reaper completely bamboozled. A little bit of me was beginning to see my death as a gateway to where the earths many unanswered questions would not just be answered, but wonderfully resolved. Maybe we are clinging to this world like a life raft, with a luxury cruise liner just waiting a few feet away. A place where all the injustices that we see, every day, that we all know are wrong, will be put right. Forever.

Perhaps it will be the earth perfect. I like that idea. I love this world and would love to see it reach its full potential. There would be no crime, no violence, no injustice, no sickness, no loneliness, no pollution, no famine, no poverty. Only love. Love is the universal answer to everything.

I have never been to China or Australia or Zambia or Brazil. Maybe there I will be able to walk the Great Wall, have coffee at the Sydney Opera House, stand to admire the Victoria Falls and climb up to see Christ the Redeemer in Rio, all in the one day.

All of these thoughts are now 19 years old. And I have never lost them. I have already been granted 19 years that I should not have had, so how can I have any fear when my death does eventually come. I didn't have any fear then, and now I certainly won't have any when it happens for real. But until then I will continue to cherish and appreciate every second of my amazing life. I will try to live each day by being the best person that I can be, as often as I can.

And by trying to live that way, I will always keep the hope that, as wonderful as this world is, it is still just the life raft.

My death will just be the start of the greatest adventure of all.