The Death of Ivan Ilych - Leo Tolstoy

What constitutes a meaningful life?  Certainly not a 'great' job and all the steps that we are told to take in life in the case of Ivan Ilych.  Get an education, get a job, get a spouse, have kids and a white picket fence.  While these may not be bad in itself, relationships with people have to be meaningful.  The job must bring some meaning to one's self and not merely doing a job well.  Materialism, prestige and wealth will not bring happiness or comfort in one's impending death.  For Ivan Ilych, his impending death brings no sorrow to his colleagues.  Instead, they are vying for his position.  There is little care for him from his colleagues.  Everyone acts in self-interest, including his wife.  Gerasim is the only person who showed any compassion towards Ivan and this in turn, makes Ivan feel bad.

His relationship with his wife was mainly of courtesy but of little meaning.  Although she appears to show empathy towards him as he became ill, this did not seem to console her.  Her empathy seems to really be for herself and this is made evident by her greed to get more money after he dies.  Perhaps she is just being strategic in her limited ability to support herself after Ivan's death.

I often hear people talk about working hard, saving up for retirement so they can truly enjoy life then.  But why?  Why wait until you're not as physically strong as in one's younger days to enjoy life?  This seems to be an ill logic to me.  And then you have the other extreme, of people without a care in the world in regards to their actual ability to pay for vacations, nice clothes, restaurant meals, etc.  "You only live once".  This may be a little too careless... like Madame Bovary.  Perhaps a meaningful life needs to strike a balance between the material needs (rather than wants) of being human and the intangibles that we cherish so much - love, friendship, respect, etc.

Although Ivan was not able to change his life towards the end, he regains his humanity and begins to let go of his grudges towards his family and he feels empathy for them too, realizing that they are stuck in their own human "in the moment" self-interests.

I am reminded of two characters in the manga, Buddha by Osamu Tezuka.  They are given the knowledge of their deaths, the how and when (with no exact date or time given however).  Asaji lives his life to his fullest ability, with meaning and accepts his gruesome death when the time arrives but Bimbisara agonizes over the knowledge that in the future, he will be murdered by his son.  He is consumed by this knowledge and does not live life to its fullest.

I suppose that we all have a choice, at least for those of us privileged enough to have a choice on how we want to live our lives..  and I have always thought that relationships with my partner, my family and close friends and my passion for animals supersede those of 'moving up the ladder'.  I have never been a careerist and never will be.  There has to be more meaning that a job - no matter how much I love that job.  It is the relationship with living beings (humans and non-humans) that make life worth living and the sharing of material things with others.  It's no fun having lots of stuff just to myself or to dine alone.  Meaning is now, not some afterlife.  I will sign off with one of my favourite comic strip from Bloom County, Naked in the Periwinkle.