He is far from the only one who talks this way after a diagnosis like his. So why does it take dying to start living?
What 25 patients wrote
In a study published in 2017, psychologists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, led by Amelia Goranson and Kurt Gray, searched Google for blogs about cancer and about ALS, a nerve disease that gradually takes away the use of the muscles. They kept 25 blogs that patients had written themselves and were still writing when they died.
Then they asked 45 people, found through a website where people do small online tasks for money, to imagine they had just been diagnosed with terminal cancer. Each wrote one blog post, “keeping in mind that you only have a few months left to live.”
The imagined posts came out darker. They contained more negative words than the patients’ posts from their last three months, and readers who didn’t know who wrote which found the real ones less negative. The closer the patients got to death, the more positive words they used. The researchers link that to a growing focus on faith and on the people closest to them. The bloggers could still write and had chosen to share their illness online, so the result may not hold for dying patients who are too ill to write or who keep their illness private.
Sixth in line
One man wrote down what facing death did to him, twice: on the day itself, and nearly twenty years later in a novel. On December 22, 1849, Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian writer who would later write the novel Crime and Punishment, was 28. He had been arrested that spring with members of a discussion group in St. Petersburg that talked about books the government of the tsar, the Russian emperor, had banned. That morning they were driven to Semyonovsky Square, a parade ground in the city.
Their death sentence was read out, and they were dressed in white shirts for the execution. Three men were tied to posts. Dostoevsky stood sixth, and they were called up in threes, which left him, as he put it, “not more than a minute to live.” Then drummers beat the signal to stop, and an order was read out: the tsar spared their lives.
A letter to his brother
That same day, from his cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the prison where he was held, Dostoevsky wrote to his older brother Mikhail. In that last minute, he tells him, only Mikhail was on his mind, “and only then did I realize how much I love you, my dear brother!”
Further on, he writes: “When I look back on the past and think how much time was wasted, how much of it was lost in delusions, in mistakes, in idleness, in not knowing how to live, how little I valued it, how many times I sinned against my heart and spirit, my heart bleeds.”
“Life is a gift, life is happiness, every minute could have been an age of happiness.”
He had never felt so much life seething in him as now, he adds. He was about to leave for four years of hard labor in Siberia.
The same morning, in a novel
In 1868 and 1869, Dostoevsky published his novel The Idiot. Its main character, Prince Myshkin, tells a mother and her three daughters he is visiting about a man who was led to the scaffold to be shot and pardoned at the last moment. The editors of Dostoevsky’s collected letters point to this story as an account of his own experience on the square.
By his own count, the man had about five minutes left, which in Eva Martin’s English translation seemed to him “an enormous wealth of time.” He divided them up: two minutes for saying goodbye to his companions, two for thinking about himself, one for a last look around. A little way off, the gilded spire of a church glittered in the sun, and he could not tear his eyes from its light.
Hardest of all for him was one thought: “What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as to waste not a single instant!”
Many, many minutes
One of the daughters asks the obvious question: “What did he do with these riches of time? Did he keep careful account of his minutes?”
“Oh no, he didn’t!” Myshkin answers. “I asked him myself. He said that he had not lived a bit as he had intended, and had wasted many, and many a minute.”
So I read the scene like this: on the square, his time had a number on it. Five minutes he could count, and he valued every one. Back in ordinary life the number disappeared, and the minutes felt endless again. Dostoevsky had stood on that square himself, and he still let the man in his novel lose them.
One cannot live counting each moment, the daughter concludes. Myshkin agrees, then adds: “And yet, why shouldn’t one do it?”
Before any bad news
Dostoevsky got his count on a square in St. Petersburg. Others hear theirs from a doctor. I built Last Hour Experience so you can face that count before anyone brings you bad news: about an hour alone, with headphones on, in which you go through your own last hour. It begins with the news that you have one hour left. When it is over, you get your minutes back, like the man Myshkin met. Which ones would you start counting?
Questions people ask. One of them is me.
Did Dostoevsky know his execution was staged?
No. In his letter that day, he writes that he had no more than a minute to live. According to his biographer Joseph Frank, the tsar had already approved lighter sentences, with orders that the prisoners hear of the pardon only after the whole ritual of the execution.
Where can I read Dostoevsky’s letter about his mock execution?
The full Russian text is in his collected letters and can be read online. Ethel Colburn Mayne’s English translation from 1914 stops right after the pardon, so the lines about life as a gift are missing from it. The quotes from the letter in this article were translated from the Russian.
Sources
Dying Is Unexpectedly Positive, the 2017 study by Amelia Goranson, Kurt Gray and three colleagues, published in Psychological Science, a research journal. The blogs, the instruction for the people who imagined a diagnosis, and the results come from the full text, which can be read on the Harvard Business School website.
Dostoevsky’s letter to his brother Mikhail of December 22, 1849, the full Russian text with the editors’ notes from a Russian edition of his collected works, on a website devoted to his writing. The quotes from the letter were translated from this text, and in note 9 the editors link the letter to the story in The Idiot.
Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoevsky to His Family and Friends, the English translation by Ethel Colburn Mayne, published in 1914, at the Internet Archive, an online library. Its version of the same letter ends right after the pardon.
The Idiot, the novel by Fyodor Dostoevsky, in the English translation by Eva Martin, at Project Gutenberg, an online library of books whose copyright has expired. The five minutes and the conversation afterward are in Part 1, Chapter 5.
Petrashevsky Circle, the English Wikipedia article on the discussion group Dostoevsky belonged to. Its account of the tsar’s orders about the pardon is based on Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, the biography by Joseph Frank, an American literary scholar, published by Princeton University Press.