What My Grandfather’s Last Days Taught Me About Life’s Biggest Illusion

You Can Have 100 Problems In Your Life Until You Have a Health Problem

Image by Harry Cao on Unsplash

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The truth burns through the platitudes we tell ourselves. We obsess over deadlines, career ambitions, relationship troubles — constructing elaborate hierarchies of worry until our bodies remind us of the fundamental order of things.

I learned this at twenty-three, watching my mother’s father fade into the bare essence of himself.

My grandfather had been many things: an accountant, a chess player who could see five moves ahead, a man who insisted on brewing his tea for exactly three minutes. Not three minutes and thirty seconds. Not two minutes and forty-five. Three minutes, with the precision of someone who believed the universe rewarded exactitude.

The lung disease announced itself with a cough that wouldn’t leave. “Just the season,” he said, as if winter could last six months in our part of India. Then came the diagnosis — words like “progressive” and “pulmonary” and “fibrosis” entering our family vocabulary like unwelcome guests who refuse to leave.

Before the disease, my grandfather had a specific set of problems that occupied him. The…