Guest Post: Life’s Unfair, Enjoy It! (Max Roche)

Perceived near death experiences tend to put things into perspective, as much as the real ones, as long as the feeling of your approaching end is authentic.

Some three years ago, in the middle of the summer, I started to feel some numbness in my face.  It was strange, because it was exclusively on one side of my face and it was combined with a feeling of pins and needles in one arm and one leg, on the same side.

I was a bit worried and did not quite know what to make of it. So I did the only thing I could think of (even though I knew it was stupid): I googled the symptoms. The search result/diagnosis was bad: either brain tumor or multiple sclerosis. Under either scenario, life as knew it (and, in the short term, my life itself) would be over soon.

I started to consult a neurologist, she did not see anything obvious but took it seriously enough to prescribe a brain MRI. I was scheduled to take the MRI a week later. The way I saw it, this MRI would basically tell me whether or not I was dying. And there was a good chance I was actually dying, as this was the only way to make sense of these symptoms (at least according to search algorithms).

So it did a lot of thinking that particular week. I started by feeling sorry for myself and by resenting how unfair life was. After all, I had lived an honest and decent life so far… so much for karma. Why me? Why now? 33 years old is too young to die.  Everyone would agree on that, right? And what had I accomplished so far? Not much. I didn’t get a fair shot. It really sucked…

But, as days went by, my thinking started to evolve. I had the time to look back on my years on this Earth. After all, this decent life I had lived had been rather enjoyable and these 30 + years had all been good years. Of course I had felt frustration, aggravation, disappointment, regrets, even sadness from time to time. But, overall, it had been a great life so far. Then it got me thinking… how many human beings were lucky enough to have lived such an enjoyable, 33-year long life? Out of all the human experiences that I could have lived, what were the odds that I would end up living this one?

I mean, when you think about it, the possibilities are mind boggling: out of all the human being that have ever been born, I could have been much worse. First of all, I could have been a cave man fighting for my life every day against a hostile environment. That’s not an easy life. When you are trying to feed your family as a hunter-gatherer in the middle of winter… there is no app for that! I am no paleontologist, but I am pretty sure not many cave men or women reached the age of 33. Even without going back in for thousands of years, I could have been born in the Middle-Ages, at a time when 90% of the population were basically slaves in the fields. Or, even more recently, I could have lived some of these 33 years in a war torn Europe. Had I been born in the exact same place as I have (Paris, France), only 100 years before, I would have experienced the horrors of war, all the uncertainty and fear that goes with it. When I was a kid, my great-grandmother told me stories of her older brothers who died on the front in World War I. I was too young to imagine what it was like to be one of these people, even if they were my relatives. But, for some reason, it all came back to me that week, when I thought I might be dying. I realized how easy life had been on me. Even among contemporary human beings, I could have done so much worse. I can’t imagine how hard my life would have been had I been born in Syria, Afghanistan, or even rural India. The odds for me to live these 33 years as comfortably as I have were infinitesimal.

So let’s summarize: in my life, I have never been hungry or cold for too long. I have been uncomfortable, sad, and heartbroken sometimes, but it only helped me appreciate life better. I have never felt the weight of hopelessness. I have never been deprived of my freedom and was given reasonable opportunities to define and achieve my life objectives. Above all, I have been blessed with healthy kids with a bright future ahead of them.

So what if I have to die at 33… It would suck for my wife and kids, for my parents and brothers. But these 33 good years would not be taken away from me nor would it from them. They were in our memory bank. My death would be a bucket of sad experience in an ocean of incredible luck and blessing.

In a society where most people are either bashing or trying to join the famous “top 1%”, I realized that, whether I liked it or not, I belonged to the top 0.001% most fortunate of all the 100+ billions human beings to have ever been born.

My first reaction to this thought was that I should pass it on to my kids by writing it down or recording myself somehow. But, since I was still my lazy self, I decided to wait for the results of the MRI.

As it turned out, I was fine. There was no clear medical explanation to my symptoms. But after a series of tests over a few weeks, all the lethal conditions were pretty much excluded. I was relieved obviously. I could resume the course of my life having learned a valuable lesson: never use Google to diagnose yourself (next time, I’ll try Siri)!

Jokes aside, I felt indeed wiser after this episode. I was well aware that I could lose everything overnight. I was healthy and lucky, not immune to car crashes or domestic accidents. But ever since that moment, I’ve been feeling somewhat lighter about death (about my own at least). Life is unfair, but, overall, this unfairness has favored me considerably. I don’t even feel guilty about this unfairness, because there is little I could have done to correct it. I think I should simply be grateful, enjoy and try to give back as much as possible.

I never took the time to share this piece of wisdom with my children (they are too young to understand anyway). Life caught up with me and I always had something more urgent to do than create a record of these thoughts. When Rebekah gave me carte blanche to write a guest post, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about (I just like writing, she and I have this in common). Then I realized it was the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. So here it is. I hope you enjoyed reading this. If not, at least please send the link to my kids if I get hit by a bus someday (hopefully not before they are much older). The unfairness lives on with them. They need to know how lucky they are and how grateful they should be.