I have a mole on my torso that seems to have grown a bit and maybe due to some asymmetry could be a melanoma. I've spent a fair amount of time outside and as a child I received bad sunburns from days on the beach (bad parenting but I like to believe my poor mother just didn't know any better.) These are risk factors. I have a doctor's appointment here in Sweden where we are currently living to have it checked out. If you catch any problems early, then surgical removal is a complete cure. And it's probably not melanoma.
I took a photo of the mole and asked an LLM what it thought and it said see a doctor and pointed out a couple of signs that makes it worth getting checked. This led me down the cancer rabbit hole. I am old enough to have friends who have died of cancer. These things happen.
In the particular mood I was in I started to ponder, well what if it was a late stage cancer? How would I react to that?
As the stoics say, Memento Mori. Remember that you will die.
I am 48 now which is well past Arundhati Roy's viable-dieable age of 31. People my age have strokes and heart attacks and just keel over gone in an instant. I had a health scare in my twenties which actually sank me into a depression.
But this time it was different. I wouldn't want to have a terminal illness. The main reason for that is that my children are still young-ish (13 and 10) and I think my leaving this planet would make life harder for them. I want to be around for them as they become adults so they aren't alone in the problems we all face. I also wouldn't want my wife to suffer losing me. I also deeply love life, its beauty, and I feel on fire recently with desire for new experience. The part that is different is that dying didn't seem as scary as I remember it once did.
One odd thing about me is that I have been fascinated with dying from a very early age. Not in studying how other people die, or in a morbid way of wanting to die, but rather I have often imagined what it might be like to go through the process of having to let go. A big part of my spiritual practice (I'm a secular Buddhist) was motivated by the idea that I could mitigate the suffering through training the mind for equanimity and ability to let go. I've moved on from that as a practice goal, but I still often wonder about where we might go next and what it might be like as the lights go out. I think whether we are conscious at all when that happens depends on how we die.
But all of that is different than imagining what it would be like to be diagnosed with a terminal illness that might take years but does cut one's time short. I read an excellent memoir about this by an Australian woman named Cory Taylor that left an impression. I remember her description of her first memory and her wanting to acquire poison so she would have a way out if the suffering was too great.
For me, now, with this melanoma possibility on my mind I was brought straight to the idea of living like it is your last year on Earth. Even without cancer, at some point, it is your last few fine years. Why wait until then? I felt that I should have love and patience for my wife and girls. I should go easier on then. I felt that I should engage with strangers and take time and smile and make eye contact and be kind. I felt that we should do the things we dream of now and not wait and not hoard more money. I felt that I should connect closely with my children, do projects with them, and teach them what I can. There is a deep part of me that wants to live like this now, but always forgets how to and reverts to the usual striving.
I had a colleague once who visited me at an office at another job I had moved to. We have pastrami together for lunch nearby at a famous but unhealthy eatery in Seattle. We had been friendly but not too close. I liked this colleague. As we were saying goodbye I asked him if he would like to come work at my new company and he asked me in sincerity whether I thought he was good enough. I said of course. He said, maybe after I get better from the sickness I have.
He had terminal cancer but didn't tell me that and died a few short months later. He was connecting with people, realizing that mattered. I was very moved when I learned he passed away.
This practice of how we might change knowing we only had a short time left is not just a contemplative thought experiment. Although we may not come to know this ahead of our dying, we certainly will die.