THE FINAL REALIZATION
When Death Approaches
ALEXANDER the Great (356–323 BC), the son of King Philip of Macedonia, is often remembered for his incredible conquests and the vast empire he built. The city of Alexandria in Egypt still stands as a testament to his victory there. However, despite all his successes, Alexander met his end in a palace in the ancient city of Babylon, dying in the same helplessness as any ordinary person in a humble hut. Though he had achieved everything he desired in life, he left this world empty-handed. His vast empire was divided among his generals after his death, as his only heir had already been killed. In his final moments, he confessed, “I wanted to conquer the world, but death conquered me.” He lamented that he could not achieve the peace in life that an ordinary person might attain.
The greatness of Alexander was so profound that even Julius Caesar, upon passing by a statue of Alexander in Spain, wept uncontrollably, lamenting that he had not been able to achieve even a tenth of the conquests Alexander had accomplished in just ten years.
Similarly, Napoleon Bonaparte, a man of immense power, expressed deep despair at the end of his life. His final words were, “Disappointment was a crime to me, but today no one in the world is more disappointed than I am. I hungered for two things: power and love. I attained neither power nor love. I searched extensively for love, but I never found it. If this is all that human life has to offer me, then surely human life is a meaningless thing, because its end is nothing but despair and destruction.”
Harun al-Rashid, a ruler of a great empire, admitted in his old age, “I have spent my entire life trying to avoid sorrow, yet I could not avoid it. I have lived a life of boundless sorrow and worry; there is not a single day of my life that I have spent without worry. Now, I am on the brink of death; soon the grave will swallow my body. This is the final fate of every human, but every human remains unaware of their end.”
When Caliph Mansur al-Abbasi faced death, he realized the futility of his worldly pursuits. He said, “If I were to live a few more days, I would set fire to the kingdom that repeatedly led me astray from the truth. The truth is that one act of goodness is better than this entire kingdom. But I realized this only when death took me into its embrace.”
These historical figures, who once stood as the epitome of success and power, faced death with the realization that their achievements were ultimately meaningless. Most of the world’s most successful individuals have died with the feeling that they were the most unsuccessful people in the world. The truth is that if the insights that come to a person near death had come to them earlier, their lives would have been completely different.
When a person stands on the edge of death, all the glories of the world seem more futile than a pile of ashes. In those final moments, they are often consumed by regret, unable to think about anything else. Behind them lies a world they have lost, and ahead is a world for which they have done nothing. There is no point in remembering death when it comes; the time to remember death is before it arrives. When a person is in a position of power, capable of oppressing others, and justifying their cruel actions, they are often unwilling to think about the consequences. At that time, they do everything they should not do to satisfy their ego. But when their strength diminishes, when their actions start to haunt them, and when they realize they are in the clutches of the merciless angel of death, that’s when they remember their mistakes. The time to remember, however, was when they were making those mistakes and refusing to heed any advice.
Mao Zedong (1893–1976), after ruling over a great nation with nearly 800 million people for almost 30 years, finally departed from this world. In 1965, he told Edgar Snow during an interview, “A thousand years from now, all of us—even Marx, Engels, and Lenin—will look rather ridiculous.” Although he said this in the context of political and economic theories, perhaps death would reveal within just ten years that this statement holds true in another sense as well. What a person does before death to create their personality becomes completely meaningless in life after death. They suddenly realize that those things considered most important, and for which they dedicated their entire life, hold no value here.
