How to Live with Dying
<i>Famously, after the Greeks triumphed, the soldier-messenger Philippides set off at a run toward Athens to announce the good news, covering the roughly 25 miles without a break. When he arrived at the Greek assembly, he burst into the chamber, exclaimed, “We have won!,” and died on the spot.</i><p>That doesn&#x27;t really do justice to the story. First he ran more like 150 miles to request assistance to help them combat an invading force. The 25 or 26 miles he ran before dying was the tail end of a much more epic effort.<p>I made my peace with my mortality in my thirties when I spent a year at death&#x27;s door. And then, silly me, tried to share that with people in online discussions and it didn&#x27;t go like I expected.<p>One day, someone older than me more or less told me &quot;You are scaring people because they haven&#x27;t yet made their peace with their own mortality.&quot;<p>Stories like this can be a good thing to write for the author. It can be a therapeutic process that helps them get unstuck from a big emotional experience and move on and live more in the present with the time they have left.<p>And it can be experientially valuable to the reader. It can be interesting to read of the subjective experience of coming that close to dying and what that looks and feels like to this one person who stood that close to the void and didn&#x27;t quite fall in.<p>But stories like this are unlikely to help most people come to terms with their own mortality -- though if you, also, find yourself standing on the precipice or having recently come back from it, stories like this may be especially meaningful and valuable. But for those who haven&#x27;t spent time anywhere near the precipice, this is highly unlikely to be some means to deliver enlightenment or some such.<p>How you relate to a piece like this will have a lot to do with where you are in life and where you have been.