Inspired by a post by @cryotosensei in Stacker Saloon regarding his ex-student of 12 years who has blood cancer, I wanted to share some thoughts related on this topic based on a personal experience.
Firstly, I would like to say that we humans often take things for granted, but we forget that life is very fragile and can be broken at any moment. For example, you have a serious accident on your way to work and you are in a coma for three months, but when you wake up you realize that you can no longer walk because you are paralyzed; you are having fun with your friends and suddenly you have a heart attack and die; while you think you are in perfect health, a simple examination reveals that something is wrong with your body, and a more detailed examination reveals that a mass of tumor has developed inside you, which has now reached the final stage, and the doctors give you only a few months to live; and such cases are endless. No one has made a contract with some supernatural power to live 70, 80, or 90 years. Everything is uncertain. Some say that man's fate is in the hands of God, and others say it is in the hands of chance. But it is not in human's hands.
Secondly, I would like to tell you that two years ago I had an almost personal experience of the last example I mentioned: suddenly discovering that a tumor mass is rapidly growing inside you. I say almost personal because the tumor mass did not develop inside my body, but inside my father's body. I remember that I had even written a haiku in my language for this experience, which I will try to translate into English, trying to convey the idea behind this haiku:
like a snow avalanche is zooming silently out the evil tumor
The idea is that like a small avalanche of snow that expands and becomes a huge mass of snow that destroys everything in its path, so too this small dead cell expands and becomes a large mass of tumor that ultimately destroys the human body.
My dad was a simple man. He worked all his life as an electrician and had a difficult life. He was a very gentle, soft spoken man, but he was reserved and introverted. It was very difficult for me to communicate with him, especially during my teenage years, and a great distance was created between us as the years passed. After I turned eighteen, I left my parents' home. I went to another city to study, but later I settled there and I still live in that city. So I could not go to my parents' house very often, and the communication with my father was very limited and superficial. However, I always wanted to break the ice that had been created in our relationship, but I never took that step and put it off for later with the idea that I'll do it sometime in the future. And the years went by...
Two years ago (about 20 years after I left my parents' house), my parents moved to the city where I live, and now I could see them very often, and with a lot of effort, I started to have a more open and deeper communication with my father, and it seemed that things were going well. But less than a month after they moved to my town, my father suddenly began to have difficulty breathing. He had been a smoker all his life. After many medical examinations and tests, it was very clear that my father's lungs were affected by a very rare and very aggressive tumor, which showed no visible signs until it reached the final stage and was blocking his breathing.
No doubt it was a hard shock for me and my mother. He was still young. He was in his 60s. It all happened very suddenly. Just when I thought I would finally have some time to develop a deeper relationship with him and "make up for lost time," we were unexpectedly faced with this terrible disease. Life is never what you want it to be.
From the moment he was diagnosed, my father lived only three and a half months, but even those months were filled with physical and emotional pain. He began to close in on himself again, and it became even more difficult to communicate with him. At least his suffering didn't last for a long time.
Life gave me a great lesson, but I had to pay a high price for it: the lack of communication with my father. And the lesson I learned is this: Take nothing for granted! Be aware that you can lose everything at any moment! If you have something important to do, do it now, while you still have time, because you never know what tomorrow will bring! And I saw what "tomorrow" has brought me...
I hope my experience inspires you and you don't make the same mistake I did!