I had first noticed the shortness of breath only about a month ago, while going around the office during my usual afternoon stroll. While I had complained for some months now of an on-again, off-again dull pain on the left side of my chest, doctor friends told me that it was probably more of a muscle issue than anything else. I knew, of course, that I was out of shape, and navigating a flight of stairs had usually left me short-winded. But I figured that these symptoms were merely the manifestation of the need to get some physical exercise. And so, I decided to resume my former gym regimen, and I managed to get through around thirty minutes on the treadmill, and another thirty minutes with weight training, four times a week for the last three weeks. While I did feel tired and uncomfortable after each session, I thought hat this was just the usual aches and pains common with resuming physical activity after a long period of sedentariness.

Last week, however, on one particularly hectic afternoon, I found myself dizzy and severely short of breath after having to climb a flight of stairs to a conference room. Luckily, the company physician was on-call, and I had myself diagnosed immediately after the meeting. He said that while it did not seem particularly serious, he had observed, through his stethoscope, that I had an irregular heartbeat, and therefore suggested that I see a cardiologist and undergo ECG testing at the soonest possible time.

I got particularly scared for a couple of minutes after that diagnosis. The hypochondriac in me started to calculate the worst-case scenarios. Considering that I had been experiencing the symptoms for about three weeks now, and coupled with that dull chest pain from months and months ago, I convinced myself that I had some serious medical condition which would soon cause my death. I certainly did not want to go to bed that night, and suddenly not wake up the next day.

For my own peace of mind, therefore, I drove myself after work to the emergency room of the Cardinal Santos Medical Center, in San Juan, and complained of my shortness of breath and dizziness. I told them of the company doctor’s earlier diagnosis of an irregular heartbeat, and how he had suggested that I should get an ECG in short order. They ushered me into a gurney at the corner of the emergency room, drew the cloth partition, and connected my finger to a contraption that measured my blood oxygen level. The nurse, as she wheeled a printer-like machine right beside the gurney, asked me to take off my shirt and remove all metallic objects from my body. She then began attaching wires to my chest which were fastened with what looked like suction cups. It was an ECG machine. Moments later, I watched as scribbles emerge, much like a fax machine produced a telephone message-- the electrical impulses from my heart. The nurse took the read-out and said that I should wait for the doctor on duty to interpret the findings.

The verdict: Blood oxygen level, normal. ECG results, normal. But what of my dizziness and shortness of breath, I asked. It could be many things, the doctor said. It could even be psychosomatic. So he suggested further tests to be sure. But he reassured me that whatever it was, it did not seem at all life threatening, at least from what the instruments told him.

I was relieved, of course, as I drove home from the hospital. But I still did not know what was wrong with me, if ever there was even anything wrong with me at all. I knew that I was (and still am) experiencing episodes of dizziness and shortness of breath, even after the most sedate of physical activities. So I asked our family cardiologist to prescribe a series of tests that I should take, if only to rule things out, or generate baseline findings against which subsequent tests or check ups can be compared.

What was terrifying about this whole experience was the fact that I was worrying about this now, at age thirty. Was I not too young, I thought.

But reflecting on it more deeply, I realized that while I was not exactly old, neither can I call myself relatively young. Unfortunate as it may seem, I realized that I am no longer invincible. And coupled with this realization is a nascent yet acute knowledge that one day, sometime soon, the movement of body and quickness of feet will not be as it used to. In short, I was confronted with the truth of my mortality. In short, I was reminded that I was actually going to die.

What was it that Homer wrote in the Iliad about death—

As the generation of leaves, so the generations of men.
For the wind pours the leaves out on the ground,
But the wood blooms and grows and begets in the season of spring.
So too the generations of men: now they bloom, now they pass away.

Too often, I suppose, with the hopes and plans and dreams of day to day living, I have gotten caught up in the belief that everything is a possibility, and life somehow goes on forever. Or at least, that there will still always be a tomorrow, or a chance to start again. It is an easy enough delusion to accept, so that it sometimes comes as an uncomfortable intrusion, these occasional reminders of mortality that nonetheless are just as true as the possibility of tomorrow. I am, after all, as that ubiquitous philosopher of death, Martin Heidegger, put it: Sein-zum-tode, a being-unto-death.

It was not because Heidegger was being nihilistic (or even morose) when he described man as a being directed towards dying. On the contrary, Heidegger points out that it is because of this fact-- that all men will ultimately die-- that man’s existence finds meaning. He believes that death is not an external “event” that happens to man at the end of his life. Instead, death is inbuilt into man’s very essence, and every moment of his life is actually in anticipation of it, whether consciously or unconsciously. It is the canvass against which human life is lived. “As soon as man comes to life,” he says, “he is at once old enough to die.” Therefore, the awareness and acceptance of death, while difficult or uncomfortable, is a requirement for authentic existence. Death makes life authentic.

The challenge, therefore, is to go on with life, knowing that one day, there is death. Indeed, it is a knowing that should not be fearful or fatalistic, but an acceptance that death— or, in my case, getting older— is just really just a part of life. I suppose the key is not to worry too much, to be cautious where caution is needed, but, by and large, to live, nonetheless. After all, to borrow the words of Sara Teasdale, “Time is a kind friend. He will make us old.”


Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold.
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.

If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long-forgotten snow.