My mother’s cousin, Kathy, shared
this article with me while we were sitting at my parent’s kitchen table this weekend, discussing family and life and everything.
It made me feel some feelings.
On the contrary, I feel intensely alive, and I want and hope in the time that remains to deepen my friendships, to say farewell to those I love, to write more, to travel if I have the strength, to achieve new levels of understanding and insight.
The above passage is not just how I hope I would spend my last days, but how I want to spend all my days prior to them. Deepening relationships. Writing more, traveling, delving deeper into life and finding what else there is.
I feel a sudden clear focus and perspective. There is no time for anything inessential. I must focus on myself, my work and my friends. I shall no longer look at “NewsHour” every night. I shall no longer pay any attention to politics or arguments about global warming.
This is not indifference but detachment — I still care deeply about the Middle East, about global warming, about growing inequality, but these are no longer my business; they belong to the future. I rejoice when I meet gifted young people — even the one who biopsied and diagnosed my metastases. I feel the future is in good hands.
My great-grandmother is dying, but not any more so than she has been dying for the past year, or the past five or ten years. She is 101, she was nearly 80 when I was born, and she has outlived almost everyone her age. The life expectancy for a woman in the United States in 1993 was 75.5, meaning that every day I’ve spent with her has been above average, has been more than I could have expected.
Seven years ago, she had a stroke. Twelve years ago, she had cancer. If you had asked me two years ago how much longer I thought she was going to live, I would have said that she had six more months.
It feels like I’m watching to see how close someone can come to death without actually being there.
When I was four or five, the idea of death was very new to me. I remember asking my mom why people died, and if my great-grandmother would die one day. She told me that yes, she would, and I accepted it after a while. I didn’t expect her to outlive my grandmother, and I don’t think I expected her to still be alive by the time I was in college, but she is. I have been profoundly lucky to have her support and perspective throughout that, and I’m so glad that I had the chance to grow up with such a strong intergenerational influence.
I cannot pretend I am without fear. But my predominant feeling is one of gratitude. I have loved and been loved; I have been given much and I have given something in return; I have read and traveled and thought and written. I have had an intercourse with the world, the special intercourse of writers and readers.
This part, at the end of the essay, was incredibly powerful for me. The idea that what makes us feel at peace when we’re nearing the end of our lives is the accumulation of that exchange, the collection of bonds that we make. I love the idea of our mission, in part, being to have this intercourse with the world.
