It's a well-written monologue, with a fabulous delivery, but I think it fails spectacularly for this argument. From what I just looked into, neither of the main people involved, including Damon, Affleck, Williams, Van Sant, Reiner or Goldman, had personally experienced those scenarios of fighting on the front lines and having a friend die in their arms, or of losing their spouse to cancer. But nevertheless, they had…
Every time one watches a romantic scene in some film you know it's fake. Actors present a totally fake version of life. Every story has to be dramatised to get over the fact that it's largely boring to people who haven't lived it. We watch so many films that they probably give us an odd impression of what reality is, what's possible, what' likely. I know what it is to sit by my mother's bed with my brain burning itse…
The song starts with a man in his deathbed whose life flashes before his eyes. As he is about to pass, he pleads with God to have one last chance to write down his ordinary life from start to end:
Please! Seeing my life like this
It made me think
I could state succinctly everything life is
If you gave me ink.
And I could maybe print every speech and thought,
And release my plot on these streets I’ve walked,
With a piece of chalk.
To paint the sharpest image of a heart
*Cuz as much as art can mimic
Nothing’s as real as a life told from start to finish*
People came from everywhere
They read the story through for days
It wasn’t nothing new or strange
Still they were moved and amazed
*It wasn’t the places he’d been or the people he’d met
It was the spaces between and the secrets he’d kept.*
They wept joyfully, for the greatest story no one told
Was just the story of an ordinary man growing old
The song is "A Story No-One Told" by Shad https://genius.com/Shad-a-story-no-one-told-lyrics