"Death cancels everything but the truth."

As I read through The Death of Ivan Illych, I was reminded of a proverb: "Death cancels everything but the truth." Up until the illness, Ivan Illych lives a life of materialistic insignificance, making large decisions in his life that are designed to please other people in his life rather than himself. As a result, at the outset of his illness he has exactly the sort of life that he thinks that he should have, with a well-paying job and an attractive wife. However, because he does not genuinely enjoy these things, his life is but a cold facsimile of an actual successful life, a house of cards ready to fall at a moment's notice. This is what the illness does to Ivan Illych, it challenges his notions about death and forces him to look beyond the materialistic confines of his life.
Ivan Illych's spiral towards death manages to be both justified and depressingly tragic. From the beginning, Tolstoy clearly feels disdain for the stock character that Ivan Illych represents, using an ironic narrative voice at several points in the story. Tolstoy establishes Illych as being an opportunistic sinner at the beginning of the book, and it is not until way later that the reader feels any pity for him. And yet, the reader does eventually feel pity for Ivan Illych as he nears death. It is not simply the fact that he is dying, it is the overwhelming sense that Ivan Illych has entirely wasted his life and that it is too late for him to do anything about it. Indeed, his inability to grasp this frustrates Ivan Illych at the beginning of his illness as he reflects on the idea that he should not be suffering because he believes he has lived a good life. Ivan Illych's discovery that "I have not lived as I ought to" sounds like a man who has lost everything that he thought he had. As his death draws, he cannot stand the presence of his wife and his friends have all but abandoned him, concerned only with how his death will affect their job status. The only thing Ivan Illych has to his credit is the reoccurring question, "why is this happening to me." For a man who thought he had everything only to be left with nothing, this must be a very depressing question.
In many ways, Ivan Illych's death is the most meaningful aspect of his life. It is only after he has lost everything that he once cherished (his all-important status symbols) and embraced the idea that "it was not all the right thing," that he is able to die in peace. It took Ivan Illych a lifetime to realize that doing what society expected of him does not lead to happiness, but this realization was the crown jewel of his life, and it gave more genuine meaning to his final moments than all the moments that came before in his life.