These are bonus days – Let’s live them!

When we’re young, we’re not very well acquainted with death. But it does trespass on our territory of imagined invincibility sooner or later.

It’s such a shock when it happens. Among older people, death is an inevitability. For the rest of us, it feels like an injustice!

My first real experience of it was when I lost my good friend the Scarab. We were deep in our twenties at the time.

The Scarab lived a reckless life, and had numerous close scrapes before his life was eventually, definitively, taken from him.

The statement from his funeral that has stayed with me all my life came from his brother, who expressed gratitude.

“We got four bonus years,” he said.

The Scarab had almost died, at one time, due to recklessness. He recovered, to some extent, from that incident and then lived those four bonus years before deciding to call things off.

It was quite magnanimous of his brother to be thankful for the bonus years, instead of being filled with regret over the decades that were lost due to his early demise.

But ever since that painful, though insightful, eulogy, I have been aware that death is about the end of a life. It is not an event in itself.

And so, while it is a timeless cliché that we need to “make the most of life”, I believe we also need to be aware of the bonus years we are granted once in a while, and make the most of those bonus years too.

We might not all be as reckless as the noble Scarab, my old mate from surfing and jolling days, but we have also been granted some bonus years. I think we should live those years accordingly.

This Covid thing got pretty real at one stage, as you’ll recall. It was an existential threat, and we can agree that a year ago we were all coming to terms with the fact that more life is not promised to us.

A while ago, some of us might have come down with some serious respiratory symptoms. There might have been a near miss or two, when a person at work contracted the virus. We may have even lost some people that we were in close contact with.

Remember that feeling from a year ago? “But I was just texting them yesterday! And now they’re gone?”

That could just as easily have been us.

You and I, just like my friend the legendary Scarab, we have been granted some bonus years.

We have had some close calls. Not because of reckless living, but because of a global pandemic. Also economic hardship, god knows. Now there’s also a world war afoot, and hell, it will probably deliver even more close calls.

So please…

Six months from now, someone close to you could be delivering your eulogy. They may very well note that your friends and family were granted a bonus year or two after that time, when you could easily have been lost to the world.

THESE are those bonus years. Every day, lately, we are waking up to a bonus day. Please, let’s just make the most of these days!

Let’s live. Whatever that means to you, let’s live!