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Embrace Death To Live Life

Life lessons from the terminally ill

apoorva
4 min readJan 14, 2020
Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

Often when I meet a new patient with a guarded prognosis, I ask them how their life has changed since their diagnosis.

There is never an instance when I am not taken aback by their answers.

Always unexpectedly, almost everyone talks about how much they have gained since their illness came around.

As millennials, we are witnessing our loved ones have historically unparalleled longevity and age beautifully.

As a result, most of us do not encounter the concept of death until much later in our own lives.

This begs the question, are we becoming increasingly oblivious to the one truth that binds us all?

The fact that we will all face death at some point ourselves?

Nobody wants to think about the end and for good reason. Human beings love certainty. It is the bane of our existence, often driving us to spend our whole life in the pursuit of a great future. Even if we know death is our final destination, we don’t want to believe it. We continue to live as if we will live forever.

We plan for forever.

The only difference between terminally ill patients and the rest of us is that they are reaching our common destination…

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apoorva
apoorva

Written by apoorva

surgeon pondering on life and its lessons

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