'Death is a great motivator of life.' An amazing international essay winner from 13-year-old Elisey Biryukov in Belarus

 

 

 

 

 

I have never really thought about the future until… Until two months ago an announcement was made at our school about one girl. She was seriously ill. She had cancer. A very aggressive form of it. The doctors in our country did everything they could for her. Still she was dying. Her only hope was the treatment that she could get in Germany. She needed minimum of 50 thousand Euros to be able to go and soon. The price of the human life. It's a lot of money here.

 

 

So her parents started raising funds wherever they could and eventually came to our school. Nowadays we have almost got used to such stories because after the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station accident the rate of cancer among children in Belarus has increased 13 times. This power station is situated almost at the boarder of our Republic and right after the accident the wind was blowing north and carrying radioactive clouds in our direction… So there are articles in newspapers, announcements on TV, Internet about kids dying of cancer who need urgent help.

 

But this girl was special. I understood it when I saw her picture. She was bald after chemotherapy, very pale, hollow-eyed and SMILING. She had such a radiant smile! This impressed me greatly. And not only me. I saw that most of my classmates brought money for her the next day. How courageous must she be to be able to smile in that situation! Then for a moment I tried to imagine myself in her place. How scary must it be to know that your life might end in a day, a week, a month… But she seemed not to be afraid.

 

Then suddenly I got an insight – I will also die, all people die. The only difference was that she knew it could happen soon. Death became real to her but for me it used to be unreal, like a phantom. I became aware of part of my future, the part that is common for all of us.

 

That day when I was doing my Math homework I imagined that our lives on the Earth aren't half-lines, they are intercepts, as they have the beginning and the end. Some of us have longer intercepts, others shorter. Anyway time is too limited to spend it on trifles, to waste it.

 

When surfing the Net I came across a book "Death: The Final Stage of Growth" by Doctor Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. It gives a lot of examples of what changes people undergo when they learn that they will die soon. They experience a great leap in their spiritual development and find themselves much happier than they used to be before when they were enjoying the boons of life thinking that they would live forever. I believe it is true for me as well. Not because I am going to die soon, on the contrary I hope to live long. But that girl and her attitude made me appreciate and treasure what I have. Now to have simply a long life is not enough for me, I wish to have "the fullness of days" as it is called in the Bible.

 

Now I try to manage my days putting important things first – developing good relations with people around me, spending time with them, showing care, listening to them. It is SO hard. Nevertheless I believe that if I manage to build my days around these priorities, I won't consider my life wasted when the predictable future (death) comes.

 

What a paradox – I decided to improve my life when I started thinking about death! How wise the Romans were when they said: "Memento mori". This expression shows that we shouldn't take our life as a rough book thinking that one day in the far away future we'll be able to rewrite it. No, we only have a fair copy. What is done is done. And what is not done might never be done. The chance to behave correctly we have today, not in the future.

 

Death is a great motivator of life. Not the fear of death that terrorists try to impose on people and by this way make them do what they want. No, I mean the recognition of it that motivates us to be good now and here, thus leading us to a better future.

 

Elisey was awarded first prize in the Children's Category of the Goi Foundation 2012 International Essay Contest for Young People.