How time changes when you're dying. ⇒
16 March 2015, evening time
I haven’t watched the video yet posted by Kottke yet. I’m not sure I will. I’m halfway through the first article by Paul Kalanithi about his cancer diagnosis, How Long Have I Got Left?, and it’s god damn amazing.
I began to realize that coming face to face with my own mortality, in a sense, had changed both nothing and everything. Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn’t know when. But now I knew it acutely. The problem wasn’t really a scientific one. The fact of death is unsettling. Yet there is no other way to live.
The second article concludes with words for his infant daughter:
When you come to one of the many moments in life when you must give an account of yourself, provide a ledger of what you have been, and done, and meant to the world, do not, I pray, discount that you filled a dying man’s days with a sated joy, a joy unknown to me in all my prior years, a joy that does not hunger for more and more, but rests, satisfied. In this time, right now, that is an enormous thing.
Anyway, as always, fuck cancer.
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