Whether you think of Nietzsche or Kanye West when you hear the line "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"–you probably think of it as true. Or at least I did. Short term struggle builds long term strength. Even life's toughest experiences have a redeeming quality inasmuch as it instructs or inspires or hardens or softens a person in the right away. Etc.

Christopher Hitchens is dying of cancer. He's undergoing radiation. In Vanity Fair he reflects on the maxim that I took as fact–and finds it false.

In the brute physical world, and the one encompassed by medicine, there are all too many things that could kill you, don’t kill you, and then leave you considerably weaker.

On the pain he felt:

To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way that it hurt on the inside. I lay for days on end, trying in vain to postpone the moment when I would have to swallow. Every time I did swallow, a hellish tide of pain would flow up my throat, culminating in what felt like a mule kick in the small of my back. I wondered if things looked as red and inflamed within as they did without. And then I had an unprompted rogue thought: If I had been told about all this in advance, would I have opted for the treatment? There were several moments as I bucked and writhed and gasped and cursed when I seriously doubted it.

He ends:

So far, I have decided to take whatever my disease can throw at me, and to stay combative even while taking the measure of my inevitable decline. I repeat, this is no more than what a healthy person has to do in slower motion. It is our common fate. In either case, though, one can dispense with facile maxims that don’t live up to their apparent billing.

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Here's a touching book trailer about dying. I've rarely seen someone on camera who appears truly at peace in life. Lee Lipsenthal does. He passed away a couple months ago. His book, Enjoy Every Sandwich, came out last month.

I wish I spent more time in nature and off-the-grid. That, and meditating, are two things I aspire to do more of in the year ahead in order to lower stress, improve health, and improve clarity of thought.

Derek Miller, a writer and technology thinker, passed away a couple days ago. He wrote a touching final post that was scheduled to publish upon his death:

Airdrie, you were my best friend and my closest connection. I don't know what we'd have been like without each other, but I think the world would be a poorer place. I loved you deeply, I loved you, I loved you, I loved you.

If you scroll through the most recent few entries (of his 10 year old blog), he writes about his decline with great eloquence, honesty, and clearheadedness.

It's a privilege (is that the word?) of the modern age to be able to read these types of blog posts — dying people documenting their decline in a public forum. There's something comforting in it, for me.

It's chilling when someone dies unexpectedly and their last blog post or tweet is especially banal or random.

Derek, long fighting cancer, prepared a thought-out goodbye post. Yet, a couple weeks ago he was tweeting about the the future of the iTunes store. He knew he was days or weeks away from dying…but in the meantime, why not link to a good commentary on whether iTunes will move to the cloud?

Perhaps it's not so chilling, after all, these sorts of seemingly trivial postings. Live each day of your life doing the things you like to do, tweeting about the things you always tweet about. Until there are no more days left to live.

RIP, Derek.

As a follow up to my previous post on the Regrets of the Dying, a reader who worked in pallitive care wrote in to share an interesting anecdote: patients where she worked always seemed to die during the very brief moments when a family member or care worker stepped out of the room. This post on a Chicago Tribune blog contains similar anecdotes from a different hospice center:

In the 1990’s, Twaddle [chief medical officer at a pallittative and hospice center] and her colleagues noticed a strange phenomenon. "Families would be in vigil for days by a bedside, finally go to get some dinner, take a shower, and when they left, the person would die,” she said. "Then, racked with a sense of guilt, self-flagellation ensued as family members said 'I shouldn’t have left.' "

So they conducted an informal study and found that more than 80 percent of the time, Moms died alone. Dads, on the other hand, seemed to wait until everyone was there and died in the midst of the gathering, Twaddle said.

“Even when the family was in vigil, it was when they left that Mom died,” Twaddle said. “What does that perhaps indicate about 'wanting someone there?'”

Twaddle knows the study was scientifically flawed, but here's her larger point: “If there is a piece that is volitional in the death process, could it sometimes be in waiting for space, quiet, and aloneness for some?”

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Here's Robin Hanson's skeptical take on list of regrets I linked to (emphases my own):

Deathbed folks are usually far from their analytical peak – they are often in great pain, and rather muddle-headed. So why would we think their comments especially insightful? I suspect we attach unrealistic significance to deathbed words because we are terrified to think about death, and eager to show our devotion to the dead and dying.

But if deathbed regrets are less than reliable descriptions of reality, where might they come from? One theory is that they are like the famous interview question “What is your main fault?”, which evoke answers like “I work too hard” or “I’m too much of a perfectionist.” These are obviously attempts to brag about a good feature, but call it a “fault.” All but regret #4 above fit this directly – they basically say “I sacrificed so much for you people.” Regret #4 similarly declares how much the dying cares about others.

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If all this talk of death is getting you down, here's a song from Glee that gave me goosebumps, and another one featuring Gwyneth Paltrow that got stuck in my head the moment I heard it. (You've been warned.)