Anita Moorjani (2012) Dying To Be Me. My Journey from Cancer to Near Death to True Healing.

I consume these books like sweets. A guilty secret. Guilt is always bad for you. You know how it goes. Anita Moorjani died then she has a choice whether she wanted to come back to this world, or stay where she was, heaven. Heaven is not a place with celestial gates and angels strumming harps, rather it is a state of bliss. Since there is no such thing as time, it could be said to be eternal. We know she came back, because here she is telling the reader all about what happened.

She was courted by the publishers Hay House. I hadn’t heard of Hay House, but they’re big in America in this genre and publish world-wide.

Stories follow a similar trajectory of before and after. You get big bucks for your dollar when the journey the person has been on leads to their death and resurrection. Anita Moorjani was brought up in Hong Kong. She was brought up in the Hindi faith and could speak fluid Cantonese which she learned from her nanny and English which she learned from school. Her mother and father following their own upbringing tried to organise an arranged marriage for their daughter, Anita.  She played along, but then didn’t and made a love match.

This is part of the background stuff. She was ordinary before she was extraordinary. I don’t mean that in a patronising manner. The structuring of the story of Bernadette Soubirous, for example, starts with the extraordinary and works its way back to her humble roots. I believe both of these stories, just as I’m sure both narrators also believed them. But there are parts of such narrations which I disagree.

It doesn’t make much difference to my life if Anita Moorjani died and came back to life, was able to miraculously hear what the doctors in corridors and rooms thirty or forty feet away were saying. Was able to tell what her brother, Anoop, who was travelling on a flight from India to be by her side was thinking. It doesn’t make much difference to me that she thinks we are in a sense magnificent and somehow we lose that childish glitter in our eyes and settle for something less. We are in essence all each other. 

I get it, I really do. I don’t wholly believe it and sometimes, most times I don’t believe it at all. If we are able to live multidimensional lives the past and present crossing over and conjoined, none of these things matter much either.  

I get it that Anita Moorjani says that she can no longer work in a job she hates and neither should we. Neither should anyone. I agree, wholeheartedly, except for one very big thing, money. The average person in London, for example, needs to find £2000 a month for rent. I belive that means many millions of people need to do jobs they hate.

I don’t think there is a god that watches every feather that falls from a sparrow and will provide for you. My experience tells me you’ll starve. That’s most folk’s experience and has been for most of history. For those lucky enough not to be overly concerned about money, or what kind of work they don’t do, then they are the lucky few. And god bless them. As for me, I’m dying to be me too. I guess I’ll just have to wait. I don’t mind. But I am getting on in years. Death doesn’t frighten me, because I’ve not met it.  I will. We all will. Books like this are sweet, but empty for now.