A meditation on life and death, and the meaning of it all
Jane’s best friend lost her husband. This was just the other day, the day before yesterday, in fact. Jane is my wife. One minute, the husband was fine, or so everyone thought, and the next, he was gone. Collapsed in his own house. Lights out. A snap of your fingers.
They were in the ambulance when we heard about it, and he’d been without a pulse for thirty minutes. It didn’t sound good. It sounded really bad. It sounded like he never regained consciousness. We suspect it might have been a stroke, in hindsight. Jane’s friend thinks her husband might have suffered an episode earlier in the week, which nearly went unnoticed.
He’d been working in the yard, in the summer heat, and when he came in, he was very red in the face and was babbling a bit incoherently. This worried her at the time, but not enough, as it turned out. Of course, now she feels like she should have made a bigger fuss, should have said something, made him go see a doctor. But no one knows anything, and I’m sure he would have waved her off, assured her he was fine, or that he would go next week.
The morning he died, he seemed fine, but apropos of nothing, he told her, “You know, if I die, I’m okay with that.”
He must have known something was going on, or at least felt it. Not a premonition exactly, but maybe he just didn’t feel all that well. Maybe he was simply feeling his own mortality. He may have felt horrible but was too afraid or obstinate to get it checked out, or even to admit to himself, let alone to her, that he wasn’t well. Men are champions of keeping it to themselves, trusting that most problems will take care of themselves and go away if only we ignore them.
This is, I believe, the real reason women outlive men. Pure, unadulterated obstinacy and delusion. It won’t happen to us, and if it does, we don’t want to talk about it, anyway. It will be what it will be. We’d rather die than be told we are sick. We can’t do much about either, most of the time, so why dwell on it?
I keep thinking about a scene in the movie “Steel Magnolias,” where Sam Shepard (Spud) is talking to Dolly Parton (Trudy), and he tells her, “I feel sorry for them, you know. I mean, especially Jackson. Losing Shelby like that. If something like that happened…I don’t know what I’d do. A thing like this doesn’t make any sense. No sense a’tall.”
It gives you perspective, it does. How much of our daily dose of nonsense would we really be worried about if we knew this was our last day on earth? Would I still mow the lawn? Would I bother collecting the chicken eggs? Worry about the ivy growing on that tree? Probably. Maybe. As the Romanians say, “The war rages on, and grandmother washes her hair.”
You have to keep paying the bills and doing your chores. You have to take out the trash, do the laundry, and write in your diary, because there’s a good chance that you’ll wake up again tomorrow and get to do it all over again. Not have to, but get to.
That’s the part that can be difficult to remember. That each day truly is a gift. We don’t have to do any of it if we don’t want to. Not really. We all have the power to end things prematurely, just a turn of the wheel or the pull of a trigger, but that seems rather ungrateful when so many struggle just to survive. Admittedly, that’s not enough for some people. Life can be acutely painful, and the blackness of nothing can seem like a relief, but for me, I’d rather feel something than nothing, even if it’s uncomfortable.
Most people who golf suck at it. It’s a ridiculous game, impossible to master, where even the great ones struggle. Occasionally, however, every golfer hits a sweet shot right on the screws, a tiny sliver of perfection, and that’s what keeps them coming back. Like a hopeless addict, endlessly searching for that first high, the delirium of euphoria, and the loss of self, where nothing hurts and all is well. The purity of dopamine.
It’s the same with writing, I think. I might write four or five paragraphs, or pages even, just to get to that one line or idea that makes it all worthwhile. That’s how we need to think of our remaining days, no matter how many we imagine we have left. They’re not all meant to be epic. We’re all just looking for that one moment, that one magical sliver of a moment in the midst of the mundane. That’s what keeps us going.
I was thinking about death, with respect to those who have died young, or at least left us before what we assumed was their time. Often, they are celebrities. We think they died too young, too soon, but what if that wasn’t the case? What if they left exactly when they were meant to leave? What if that’s all they were meant to do?
Maybe the Universe’s grand playwright had failed to write a second or third act for them. All they got was that one stupendous first act where they brought the house down, and we all stood and cheered, thrilled to be there to see it. What a gift, when so many lead lives of quiet desperation. Why not take the big swing? Why not go for broke? What have you got to lose that is more important than the only life you’ll ever live? Nothing, I would argue. Nothing, a’tall.
I’m not terribly religious these days. I just can’t get past the flawed logic of the whole thing. I like to think there’s a God and a heaven, or at least some purpose behind all of this chaos, but there’s really no evidence to suggest, or even hint, that this is the case. I believe we have a purpose, but I no longer believe it must be tied to the supernatural, although I remain open to that possibility. Why remove your options?
We are here to do the most with the gifts we have, to be the best versions of ourselves that we can be. Even if you have nothing else, not a spec of natural talent or marketable skill, you can be generous, you can be gracious, you can be patient and kind. You might be a brilliant scientist who becomes best known for being a Little League coach who influences the trajectory of one boy’s life for the better.
Here, you thought your purpose was to change the world through science, but it was to change this other boy’s life through kindness, so that he could change the world. You were a critical component, a key to changing the world, just as you dreamt it would be; you just didn’t understand your part in it.
We are all just one of the many instruments that make up the orchestra. We don’t have to be the ones to write the music or conduct the ensemble. We don’t have to be the solo act, or even the first chair. Whitman told us that the powerful play goes on, and we may contribute a verse. Just a verse. What will our verse be, he asked us? We probably won’t know until the curtain falls and the lights go out. It will be left to others to decide what role we played. So we do the best we can with what we’ve been given, in the time allotted to us. That’s really all we can do.
Today I must mow the lawn and trim the edges. I will collect the chicken eggs and fix the automatic waterer that Jane has forgotten how to put back together. I will blow off the deck, and I will make myself dinner. Jane is off taking care of a few grandchildren while their parents are doing something else they think is important. It’s all important, and none of it matters, except it does.
It all matters.
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