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Comment by holdenc | Hacker News Reader

One of the things that strikes me as odd is the personal obligation leaders feel to their companies as they prepare to die. In some ways it's understandable since they've invested a huge amount of personal energy into their work, but in a different way it shows that there is little separation between their personal and work life.

I couldn't believe it when my cousin (a CTO of a large company) was dying of multiple meyloma -- he actually was working from his hospital bed until a few weeks before he got an infection and died. That's probably exactly what he wanted, so godspeed. But, seeing that was enough to make me quit my job and try to keep things in perspective. Your customers and colleagues are can be extremely close and valuable, but your family and life you only get once.

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Another way to look at it is that it was probably his only chance of human interaction that didn't directly involve his current predicament.

If he wasn't working he'd probably be doing nothing but staring into the air waiting to die. Having to nothing to do but deal with medical staff, and group after group of well-meaning relations who feel sorry for you is probably very mentally stressful.

Continuing to work is also a way to feel you have value as a human being and there is more to you than your illness.

I belong to a number of a groups for people with a deadly medical condition. It is very clear to me that well-meaning well-wishers are often essentially helping to kill people with kindness. Their unstated assumption is you aren't going to get well, death is inevitable. Such thinking tends to help make it inevitable. And hearing that 500,000 times from all the people who "love" you makes it extraordinarily difficult to resist that thinking and therefore resist that path. When you are working, no one is giving you that message. They are saying "I need that report next week", which implies you will be alive next week to deliver it. That's a much healthier message than having everyone visit you daily for fear it might be the last chance they have to speak with you as you might drop dead any second now.

There's also the unspoken assumption that once you find out you're going to die you're going to drop everything, tour the world, meet up with all your loved ones etc. But that's a very Disney-esque view of the world.

We all know we're going to die in 20-60 years. I don't see why people that know they're going to die in 6 months or 2 years from now should be expected to behave any differently than the rest of us.

There's certainly a place for getting your affairs in order, but spending the rest of your days feeling sorry for yourself is a bad waste of time as far as I'm concerned.

Medical care for a serious health issue can be extremely expensive. My sister has been battling cancer on and off for over 11 years and has had 4 separate occurrences. She continues to work. She needs her job because it provides better insurance than her husband's and they need two incomes to pay the medical bills.

You would practically need to be Bill Gates to do the Disney-esque Version of living with a life-threatening medical condition.

    You would practically need to be Bill Gates to
    do the Disney-esque Version of living with a
    life-threatening medical condition.

That or live in a country with a working single-payer health care system. I.e. anywhere in the first world except the US.

An alternative perspective is that it really is intense personal passion for what they do, not a sense of obligation, that drives leaders to do that.

Also, nobody wants to be remembered as someone who checked it of work and let the financial future of his family erode as a result of mentally just left the scene, so to speak. At least, in abstract; clearly, concrete feelings upon terminal illness can be very different.

You get your customers and colleagues only once, too. Maybe he could have chosen better priorities. At least he had some.

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