If Tomorrow were Your Last Day

What would you have done differently?

What would you do differently for the time remaining?

Life is real short. And always there is the lurking likelihood, no matter how tiny, that anyone among us might have an unexpected encounter with our Maker the day after today.

My apology for starting on such a sombre note, especially on an otherwise chill and relaxing Sunday evening. But hey, I am sure we all have such moments of contemplation in our lives, whether it is on Monday or at the weekend.

Compared with many of you, I am merely a green rookie when it comes to life experience. Yet, at the tender age of 23, perhaps I have started to get the feel of how fast time is flowing from the tab. Each morning waking up, I could feel the day streaming. Fast, Through my fingers.

It is often said every change starts with a trigger point. For me, this sudden acute awareness of my finite time on Earth came with the permanent departure of someone I have known for all my life.

My grandpa’s.

Little did I know when the plane touched down on Hanoi, Vietnam that chilly February evening that I was about to see my grandfather for the very last time. In that pulsating atmosphere of Tet infused with the dahlia pink of peach trees, the whole family sat down in his cosy living room, around my grandpa, half paralysed from a recent stroke. We hugged him. We spoke out loud to his ears. We kissed him on the cheeks as we said goodnight.

On the very day I was supposed to come and bid him goodbye before leaving for Australia, the news came. My grandfather passed away. 10:00, he was having his big breakfast. 13:00, he was no more.

It took me a while to comprehend the profoundness of what happened. Until that moment, Death seemed to me as remote a notion as space and the Universe. But right there, it just took away someone I knew so well. With a date and time, just like any other scheduled activity in a day.

Death never books a visit in advance, but when it does, it always leaves us mortals with a lot to contemplate on. At my grandpa’s funeral, as family members, relatives, friends and neighbours queued to bid him farewell, it finally sank in to me how precious and transient that one life we are given. So often we treat life as a commodity to be expended and squandered at will. I am sure at some points we all fell prey to the pettiness of daily existence, laziness, negativity, ego, envy, you name it.

At that moment as I was standing next to my grandpa’s coffin, I could not help questioning him in my mind.

“Do you have any regret when you look back at all those years?”

“If you could do it again, what would you have done differently?”

“If there was one last piece of advice you could give me now, what would it be?”

Life is like a bus, except that we neither choose nor know where our final stop would be. Maybe in 70 years’ time. Maybe in two decades. Or maybe tomorrow.

If tomorrow or some day in the future you and I are going to leave everything behind, what will we do differently today?