Most humans die with regrets.
The final peace on their faces is just the result of an instinctive mechanism to suppress the last bits of pain before the body escapes consciousness forever, not the peace cultivated from any true understanding. The flashbacks are merely a conglomerate of screenshots: they might have seen a glimpse of what would lead to enlightenment at fast-forward speed, but true understanding can only be reached through real-time experience.
**Imagine your life starts as a blank sheet of paper**, where you begin sketching lines while trying to make sense of existence. At some point, your brush must have passed the right spot; you catch a sign of something worth living for. You erase the unnecessary strokes, leaving only the right parts unscathed. Tracing along those paths, treacherous and wondrous, you follow and betray the patterns of life, you create your own paradigms, you find meaning in helping others. Eventually, a beautiful painting emerges from the culmination trial and error, learning and unlearning. You may then honestly say to yourself, “For once, I’ve come to understand this thing that is my life.”
Death is not that. The peace in death is mimicry at best.
Imagine one’s final moments as a desperate effort to cover the whole sheet of life in charcoal, because, theoretically, if you cover all the blank space, you also go over all the right steps that would cultivate understanding. But no painting would emerge from that convoluted mesh of a dying will. At best, it would be a blackened, unrecognizable imprint of the mind’s last-ditch attempt at life.
The tired, clinging mind, after emulating every single recess of experience, sees only an illusion of the painting it could have traced, out among an infinity of tainted scribbles. Its last effort is to exhaustively numb out the tendency to look at itself, to tell the world with a pretentious, death-avoidant reassurance, that “everything finally makes sense now, let me exit this life in the respite I’ve so long yearned for,” even when that respite is delusional and unearned, the true understanding shattered and buried under mountains and oceans of nonsense.
The ultimate irony is that the man close to death is mostly at peace with the one thing he dreads the most: his self-delusion. He lets it take over because no other mechanism is potent enough to withstand the waves of ultimate regret. In this final deal with the devil, his last gestures and expressions would seem the most honest, because they are, as he allows self deception to numb out his final consciousness, yielding completely to the lie that makes the pain of dying tolerable.
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