My last hour

The last lesson is fixed. We prepare for everything but our last lesson. Yet the last hour is the most important. It determines our entire life to date. Everything we have lived before is part of our last hour. So why do we shy away from dealing with it all our lives? The answer is quite simple: it is our primal fear of death and the uncertainty about the afterlife.

Any serious consideration of the final hour inevitably leads to one question: why do we value our own lives so little, against all rational insight, as long as we do not see them threatened?

Why do we waste so many valuable hours as if we had an infinite number of them? Why is it so difficult to switch off the hour-eating mechanism that was implanted in us at school, without realizing that it is our own life time that we are destroying? Twenty minutes until the break bell, two more years until the school-leaving exam, one more year until graduation, three more days until the weekend, four more weeks until vacation, and Christmas is just three months away.

We live as if we will always live. We don't pay attention to how much time has already passed, we waste it as if it were inexhaustible, when every day could be our last. How often do we hear people say: "I'll retire at 60 and only do what I enjoy." But who can guarantee us these wonderful years in the future, who can we claim them from if we don't live to see them? Isn't it too late to start living when you have to stop? What inconceivable stupidity, what thoughtless overlooking of mortality leads us to postpone all great plans for our lives to a point unknown to ourselves, to which we may never make it? There are three ways of coming to terms with the finiteness of our own lives:

• We suppress this topic for a lifetime, only to be surprised by our death completely unprepared.
• The confrontation with a serious illness or an accident: either this first encounter with our final hour is also our last and we die. Or we are given another chance. It is interesting to note that almost everyone who has been allowed to continue living after a life-threatening event would not want to miss it.

In both cases, we don't need to do anything. The final hour is suddenly very present. For most of those affected, however, it is a complete stranger who intervenes massively in their previously well-ordered lives and imposes completely different rules on them.

This book aims to offer you a third way:

• The chance to deal with what could be the decisive experience of your life before it affects you.

There are good reasons to opt for this alternative. There is nothing that people fear as much as an encounter with the unknown. Repression makes this fear ever greater, and every concrete confrontation can be a step towards overcoming it. It therefore makes sense to embark on this third path: not only will you become more familiar with the idea of your own finiteness, but above all you will realize how much you love your life and what you would still like to experience.