Life of Chuck - My Story, My Way

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I watched The Life of Chuck on a flight out of JFK. The plane had just lifted, and the movie found me. No distractions, no wandering thoughts. It landed inside me faster than Flow had on another journey.

I came of age reading Stephen King. From the haunting darkness of Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Cujo, and It to the unexpected humanity of his short stories adapted into The Shawshank Redemption and Stand by Me, King shaped my sense of how worlds can collapse, and how small, luminous acts still matter. The Life of Chuck felt like the natural continuation of that arc: not horror, but mortality seen through wonder.

The story runs backward. Death first. Then middle age. Then childhood. The world itself collapses into darkness, only to reveal the celebration of one man’s life, Chuck’s. Thirty-nine years written as if they were the span of a cosmos. When he dies, the lights go out.

That is the point: each of us carries a universe inside, and when it ends, so does the world we knew.

The movie itself poses a stark question: “If you had only one day left, what would you do - even as the universe unraveled around you?”

What lingers is the dance. Chuck was not a dancer. He was an accountant in a business suit. 

But he danced. A street drummer shifted her beat as he approached, rhythms syncopated, alive. He stepped forward, asked a girl to dance, and the town square opened into movement and joy. Not performance. Not mastery. Just life spilling into the street.


That scene mirrored the night before, when I had danced in a salsa club in Brooklyn, looking out at the Manhattan skyline. Strangers became partners for a song. Music carried across bodies. For a moment, joy outweighed everything else.

In medicine, I have seen how quickly universes collapse. A patient with glioblastoma, one month speaking, the next unable to recall his own name. A man who kissed his family goodnight and never woke, sudden cardiac arrest erasing decades of presence. A road crash, time divided into “before impact” and “after.”

And outside the hospital walls, universes collapse too. The film itself spoke of a four-day war between Pakistan and India, as if the world were fraying. That war, in fact, erupted earlier this year. Another uncanny echo, another reminder of how fragile it all is. Families keep vigil in corridors dimmed by worry, tethered by love. Zahid’s story is one such vigil, where the family would not leave his side.

Others leave their imprint differently. Nadir once mapped out SanFrancisco for me between sets in a gym. That mapped orientation shaped how I experienced the city.


My recent half-planned trip through New York would have earned his nod too. He is gone, but his way of charting places remains in me. Chuck’s dance felt like that, fragments of orientation and joy that outlive the person.

And then, almost as if to underline it all, came the dream. A close friend, my Rooh ki Saheli (soul-companion), told me of a dream she had about my life and death, articulated in its own dream-logic.

When I later watched The Life of Chuck, the resonance was uncanny, as if dream and film were speaking the same language, reminding me that not everything yields to STEM logic, that some things are simply known and carried. It sobered me. It reassured me too.

At the end Chuck speaks: “I am wonderful, I deserve to be wonderful, and I contain multitudes.”

It echoes Whitman, yet becomes his own declaration - a soft surrender, a claim to wonder in the face of absence, and a reminder that within any ordinary life lies an extraordinary universe.

So, what do I take from this?

To live as well as I can with the time left.

To do right by family, friends, humanity, and also by the plants, animals, and environment we share. To not get lost in clinging. And to still have fun. To dance through whatever remains, whether with others, or on my own - on my own terms.

The universe collapses. The beat remains.

My story. My way.


References

In acknowledgment: Co-piloted with GenAI, nudged by memory, meaning, and 45,000 feet of stillness. For my Dost – Shaahid - my Rooh ki Saheli.

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