I found out last week that a girl I went to school with died in an accident recently. I haven’t known her for 25 years, but because of social media and friends in common I still knew what she was up to. From what I know, she was a happy and successful person who lived in Europe. And now she’s gone.
And then yesterday I spoke to someone on the phone who told me that her friend had been overseas visiting his dying relative and had himself been diagnosed with cancer whilst abroad. That was two months ago, he died today. Previously well, my age, now gone.
I only have to read the news, or look at LinkedIn, to know that many more people have died recently. In fact, Google tells me that 513 people die each day in Australia, and 150,000-174,000 people die across the world every day.
Every time someone dies, it is an absolutely devastating event for the people who love them. Loved ones who now have the task of living on without them. Enveloped in grief, cocooned by loss, but also still trying to keep connected with life as it continues to move forward. My heart feels heavy when I allow myself to try and imagine their pain.
“It really puts things in perspective” my friend said whilst recounting the news of her friend’s death. “Certainly clarifies what’s important”. And for most, what’s important is not work. It gets reshuffled and downgraded in the priority ladder whenever something catastrophic happens.
But the reshuffling tends to be short lived. Clarity becomes clouded, priorities slide back.
When you work in healthcare these events can become commonplace. Even if the event is not as final as death, the ill health and suffering that people experience become routine. Every single day we see these things happen to other people. We walk in and out of the door like we are walking in and out of another world – a world where bad things happen to other people and where we are there to try and fix them.
When this happens often enough, it can feel like the odds of something happening to us have actually gone down. But they haven’t. These bad things are just as likely to happen to us as someone else. The accidents, the cancers, the diseases that seem to appear from nowhere and catapult people from living into dying. That will be us one day. The question is not if, but when.
So how can we maintain clarity? How can we keep our priorities in order and make sure that our day-to-day lives honour what we know is important?
I don’t think this is something that comes naturally. If it did, this conversation would not be needed. Clarity fades and life inevitably becomes busy again. Maintaining the clarity that often comes only from tragedy is something that needs to be practiced, a new skill to learn, a new approach to embrace.
Perhaps the practice is simply this: to pause, every now and then, before life forces us to. To ask ourselves whether the way we are spending our days reflects what we would say matters most if everything changed tomorrow. To make the phone call, take the day off, sit with the people we love, or simply notice the ordinary moments that are so easy to rush past.
None of us have a choice about how much time we have. But we do have a choice about how we use the time we have today.
Because before we are doctors, leaders or professionals, we are human first.
