Tomorrow

I’ve got a plan.

The doctor informed me half an hour ago that there is a 50% chance I will not see another morning.

I am grateful that my hospital bed is not far from a window.

I see a meadow outside, and… beautiful sunlight.

Having been a surgeon myself, I have worked within the walls of this hospital for the past seventeen years. I cannot recall ever looking outside, on the morning of a working day.

Now that I know that today might be my last day, why am I falling back to the cliché of admiring nature outside the large glass window? Perhaps it is inevitable…

In any case, I have a plan.

I have no children.

My parents died long ago.

My wife and I have not spoken for more than a decade, and… I suppose she is now my ex-wife now, as she has a husband and family of her own now.

I am… free… and alone.

I do not know who you are.

I do not know how you can read this message, or whether you can.

So let me tell you about the final plan I have come up with.

Every day of my work life was scheduled down to the minute.

So how can I go without planning my last day?

I have a bit of time today, though. The ache in my arms and back, and the constant sniffling makes it difficult for me to concentrate.

However, I have only one item on my to-do list.

I look at the post-it note next to my bed where I wrote it down: “Attain self-realisation”.

I have never meditated in my life.

I only became interested in the topic a week ago, when I was first diagnosed with this illness. I spent any spare moment I had to read books I could find online on the topics of meditation and realising your true self.

None of it made much sense to me.

There seems to be no universal definition of meditation.

However, I still have to try.

I close my eyes, and inhale as deeply as I can.

My mind has too many stray thoughts. My back pain is excruciating. I have lost my sense of smell. Can I still taste food?

My colleagues look at me with pitiful eyes.

How can so much effort and stress amount to nothing?

I inhale again.

I let the breath go, with one lengthy exhale.

I keep my eyes closed… for as long as I can.

At what time had I started? Perhaps I should have recorded the starting time, so at least once I was done I could measure how good I really was.

Some of the books I had read mentioned monks who had meditated for tens of thousands of hours, some of them claimed to have done it for over 100,000 hours. Was that even possible?

If I treated this as a profession, and meditated for, say, 10 hours a day, that worked out to be 10,000 days. In other words, it would be 10 hours of daily meditation for just over 27 years.

Perhaps it is not impossible, if that was your profession.

Why did the thought of meditation come to me, in my final week?

Perhaps I considered my own contributions… saving lives… as not sufficiently satisfying? I had lived a wealthy life. My apartment was in the centre of the city, with luxuries I seldom enjoyed.

Even in my free hours, I would be stressed about work.

I had saved hundreds of lives, but could I have done more? There were a couple of instances I did NOT want to think about. The guilt… of a single blunder that cost the lives of…

… I do not wish to dwell on it.

Are my eyes still closed?

Am I still alive?

I seem to feel my back ache still… but it is less severe than before.

It is not standing in the way.

I can see a vague shape in front of my eyes. The colour is odd… a sort of reddish-black glow, the one you see when you have your eyelids shut for a long period of time.

I hear the other patients, the nurses… I hear the wind outside the hospital window. They left it open, for a short while.

I taste the inside of my mouth… or in other words, nothing at all. Food has no smell or taste for me any longer, and they might as well feed me fibrous waste for all I care.

However, my deepest sensation is that I do not feel that loving touch…

My wife… my family… my mother… It has been years since I felt a deep embrace.

I can somehow begin to observe all of these thoughts.

Where are my thoughts coming from?

They must be from my brain… or are they?

Yes… I can sense the processing in my brain, or am I just imagining it? My mind is the one asking me to keep my arms and legs still, and concentrate on this single thought.

There is nothing else.

I am glad.

I do not know what time it is.

Will it be late morning, when I open my eyes?

Or will it be afternoon… or twilight? That would imply I have been meditating for hours.

Is that really possible?

Will I… even open my eyes ever again? What if I am already dead, and this is what death feels like? After all, I am not moving.

I cannot see, smell or taste anything.

I can hear the breeze in the distance, though. Yes, it is unmistakable.

I am still alive today.

Maybe I will survive another day.

Tomorrow, you and I may be in the same place.

I do not know who you are.

I do not know whether you can read this.

But I know this… if you read this final message of mine tomorrow, then you and I will be together.

You and I will be the same.