Chip's biggest fear wasn't dying, it was not living

Chip did not fear dying. He feared not living to the fullest in whatever time he had left on earth. Despite feeling crappy from chemo or weak from not being able to eat, he helped around the house, worked and traveled. He willingly (and, when necessary, forced himself to) do whatever made him feel alive.

Despite lockdowns and Covid threats, Chip exposed himself to Covid if it meant getting the “stuff” of living done. He went into a hospital countless times for chemotherapy, blood transfusions and ER visits. He visited with family and friends and wasn’t afraid of being exposed to the potentially deadly virus. The day before he died, he sent me to the liquor store with a long list in hand. He thanked me when I grocery-shopped and ran other errands for us, knowing full well he was unable to perform those duties amongst the living since he was so weak. Chip wasn’t afraid of catching Covid and dying. No, he desperately wanted to keep living with cancer….Covid be damned!

Chip knew, as he always had, that he was going to die at some point. Long before he knew he’d be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, after which living life to the fullest took on new meaning, he risked his life climbing four of the seven tallest peaks in the world. He rode motorcycles and scuba-dived with sharks off the coast of South Africa. Never afraid of death, he lived a full and exciting life. Throughout our relationship, both before and after his serious cancer diagnosis, he told me often “We’re all going to die” and explained that he had always been committed to living like every day was his last.

New York Post opinion editor Sohrab Ahmari perfectly summed up Chip’s attitude about living life to the fullest both before and after cancer. When reading Ahmari’s recent article titled “Why facing death, rather than fearing it, will lead to a better life,” I was reminded of Chip’s truth with which I one-hundred-percent agree: Death will claim you at some point and you cannot escape it, no matter how you try.

One snippet from Ahmari's article tells us:

As the past year’s anguish shows, a life lived in constant fear of death isn’t a good life. Barring a spiritual revival that opens up a transcendent horizon for people in the West, we desperately need a saner ethic for coming to terms with death. There is no better one to be found in all of Western thought than the work of Seneca, the 1st century Roman statesman and philosopher.

Seneca spent his whole life thinking and writing about death, teaching Romans to live each day as if it could be the last and, in this way, to make peace with mortality. As he advised a friend, “make your life joyful by putting aside all your anxiety about keeping it.”

As Ahmari also tells us that Seneca believed that "fear of death is not only pointless, it prevents us from keeping the right perspective on our lives." In Seneca's defense, Ahmari wrote:

Seneca certainly didn’t advise that we should live like foolhardy jackasses; if he were around today and knew about the germ theory of disease, he would take reasonable COVID precautions.

Maybe Chip had read Seneca growing up or later in life. Maybe living life to the fullest and not fearing death was Chip's own philosophy that he had developed over the years. But, he would certainly have agreed with Ahmari's description of Seneca's tenets that we shouldn’t fear death because "death stalks us at every turn" and that "to live fearlessly we need to make peace with the fact that death is ever-present."

Everlasting be his memory.