Making life meaningful even when facing death

Seven years ago I posted It's a meaningful life about Viktor Frankl's famous book, Man's Search for Meaning. This year, another book based on selections of Frankl's lectures that were published in German in 1946 was first published in English: Yes To Life In Spite of Everything.

The book is very short, especially in light of the fact that about a third of the  127 pages is taken up by an introduction and supplementary notes at the end. The book, however, would be worth the purchase price for just one of the stories it includes on pp. 59-62. I'll summarize it here:

A young man who worked as a graphic designer for the advertising industry was struck with a inoperable form of cancer on his spine that induced paralysis in stages. As he cold no longer work at his profession to infuse meaning into his life, he found different outlets "in the passive experiences of his restricted situation."

While hospitalized, he devoted himself to reading the books he didn't have time for while working, listened to music, and engaged in "stimulating discussion with individual fellow patients." When his physical ability deteriorated further, though, he could no longer hold the book, wear headphones, or speak with ease.

So he found himself "again pushed to one side, rejected by fate, but now not only from the realm of value creation but also from that of experiential value." While it would be understandable for such a person to descend into despair, that was not the case for this man.

Frankl recollects that when he was the doctor on duty, he made his rounds at this hospital, and this man beckoned him over. Though it was difficult for him to speak, he made a last request that shows tremendous depths.

He told Frankl that he had overheard  Professor G give orders that he should  receive a morphine injection to ease the pain of his last hours when his death would be imminent. Anticipating that he would come to that point that very night, he requested that he be given the shot now, "so that the night nurse would not have to call me especially because of him and disturb me while I was sleeping." 

Consider for a second how quick we are to disturb others when we want something because we're so used to putting our own needs ahead of others, and this man who had already suffered so much still had the strength to think ahead to express "this wish to consider others, literally in his last hour!"

Frankl adds his observation "that no terrific advertising graphics, not the best nor the most beautiful in the word... would have been an accomplishment equal to the simple human achievement that this man demonstrated with is behavior in those last hours of his life."

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