As we consider what I would do today if I were to die tomorrow, we explore how our instinct to fear and avoid death affects the way we live, and how we must consider not only well-being but also well-dying in order to truly live. Through the story of Ivan Ilyich, we examine the connection between death and life, and how facing death allows us to rediscover the meaning of life.
I once thought about what I would do today if I were to die tomorrow. I would worry about my parents. I would tell them I love them and appreciate them. The rest of my family and friends would be sad, but the person I would feel the most sorry for is myself. I thought that since the person who loves me the most is myself, I would feel sorry for myself, knowing that I would die tomorrow, and I would feel sorry for myself, knowing that I would die tomorrow.
I questioned why I felt so sorry for myself. I already know that I’m going to die someday, because everyone dies and I’m human, so why the sudden change of heart just because it’s tomorrow?
I realized that it could be a fear of the unknown. I have not experienced death. No one has experienced death. I had thought about living well, but I hadn’t thought about how to die well. Every day, we strive to stay healthy, make plans and achieve goals, but we rarely think about the end of life. Why do we ignore such an important issue? Maybe it’s because we all want to deny death. We’re all concerned with being healthy, happy, well-fed, and well-lived, and the term wellness is often thrown around. However, dying is not something we can control. There are all kinds of dangers inside and outside, and sometimes you can die suddenly without knowing the cause. The answer to this question can be found in the novels of Leo Tolstoy.
Even in Leo Tolstoy’s time, when wellness was not in vogue, the values that people pursued were similar. Ivan Ilyich, the novel’s protagonist, was a successful lawyer, married to a wealthy and beautiful woman, had children, and lived a happy and noble life, finding time to play cards with his friends. Until he fell ill with an incurable disease.
Ivan Ilyich, a proud man without a shred of remorse, initially pretended to be unaware of his illness. Convinced that if he did what the doctor said, he would get better, he fooled himself into thinking he wasn’t sick. That’s how Ivan Ilyich prepared for his death. However, this approach caused Ivan Ilyich more pain. The physical pain was certainly greater, and the mental pain that came with it multiplied his suffering. This raises a question for me. Perhaps Ivan Ilyich’s physical pain was becoming more and more unbearable. But Ivan Ilyich was more afraid of dying and more despairing of the fact that it was coming. I didn’t understand why people were so reluctant to die, given that when a person dies, the pain disappears.
But the more I thought about it, I wondered if death is so frightening because it doesn’t just mean the end of life, it means the separation from everything we love. The people we love, the accomplishments we’ve spent a lifetime working towards, the simple joys of everyday life – the separation from all of these things is what makes death so frightening. In Ivan Ilyich’s case, it may have been difficult for him to accept the sudden separation from everything he loved in life. Another reason we may fear death is that we don’t know what life after death is like. The uncertainty of what awaits us after death, no matter how natural it is, can cause great fear in humans.
But looking back at Ivan Ilyich’s life before he became ill, Ivan Ilyich was numbed to the point where he no longer found himself disgusted by the absurdity of his own thoughts, as he repeatedly did things that were disgusting to him while attending law school. The longer he ignored the absurdity, the greater the absurdity became, but he naturally fooled himself and continued to live what he thought was a noble life. This is the same way he dies. Just as he could not admit that he was in fact an absurd and ugly human being, not a noble one, he could not bear the fact that his illness was not improving and that he was rushing towards death. In other words, he lived and prepared for death in the same way.
As Ivan Ilyich’s suffering intensified, he asked God what he had done wrong to deserve this ordeal. When death came, he wanted to make sure that he had lived well. He had spent his entire life thinking about living well, but he hadn’t paid attention to whether he was actually living well. It was only when he felt the pain of death that he realized what true well-being is.
Life is a series of moments, but death is a moment. People think about how to live well during life, but they don’t think about how to die. We think about what we will strive for, what we will achieve, what values we will gain, and what happiness we will have. We don’t realize the importance of death because it’s a moment and we can’t see where it is. But even though we can’t see it, death is there, and the way we die is the same as the way we live, so we must consider it when we think about how to live.
Ivan Ilyich finds solace in his servant Gerasim, who is the only one of the people around him who comforts him. Ivan Ilyich was uncomfortable with the people around him, who pitied the dying man but acted as if death was not a part of their lives. The people around Ivan Ilyich were also trying to live happily, but they didn’t think about death. As a reader of the novel, I thought that Ivan Ilyich’s death had nothing to do with me. I observed and criticized his life without getting emotional. I was no different from Ivan Ilyich and the people around him. This is the answer to my first question. Perhaps I will forget about death from the moment I finish reading and close the book. But I want to prepare for a different death than Ivan Ilyich’s by reminding myself of wellness every time I think about it.
In conclusion, we try to achieve too many things in our lives, chase too many values, but sometimes we need to stop and think about what we really want out of life and how we want to leave it at the end. Only by facing death will we truly understand what it means to live.
