From the moment our heart stops beating and our brain ceases functioning, we remain alive for almost 15 seconds. If our last moment of consciousness were a Super Bowl commercial it would be worth nearly a million dollars. If it were an atomic bomb it could explode 7,500 times. If it were Doug Flutie’s 1983 Hail Mary pass against Miami, he could have thrown it twice and scored both times. A room erupts in laughter, a city in shamble, and a crowd in elation. And then you are dead. There is silence. There is darkness. Your brain has given up and soon your body will follow. The vessel your soul left behind will slowly break apart, cell by cell, until it has given itself back to the earth that created it. Was it worth it?

This is the question you will ask yourself in those final seconds between here and eternity. You probably won't have enough time to answer it — your brain is tired and quickly losing the oxygen it desperately needs. Your memory is fading, your eyes fogging, your body aching. But you’ll try anyway. You will close your eyes and retrace your life and hope that you made it count, but chances are, you didn’t.

You were born and it was a big deal. Maybe not to you, but to your mother and your father — if you were lucky enough to have him there with you. It was a big deal to the doctor that delivered you and the nurse that bathed you. It was a big deal to your newly-christened grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters. For a moment you were a king or a queen, giving proud and important titles to those around you, being praised as a miracle, being hailed as beautiful, being called the future.

The future came quickly. Before you realized it you were walking and talking and reading. You learned to ride a bike and taught yourself how to draw. You climbed trees and scraped your knees. You jumped from swings and slid down slides. You lay in the cool grass and stared at the clouds and then at the sun. It hurt to look too long, but you were invincible and pain was temporary and so you kept staring and you kept dreaming.

Then one day you grew up and discovered that despite your youthful naivety, pain was not temporary. It lasted far longer than your scraped knees and sun-burned eyes. It changed you. You fell in love with a boy or a girl, or maybe even both. You broke hearts and had yours broken as well. You learned to scream and cry, and stay silent even when words could have cured the pain. You discovered grudges and preconceived notions, and you learned to how use them to keep from falling too deeply in love.

Then you left home. You went to university or to the military or the workforce. Yet, wherever you went, you went to find yourself. You thought that the boy or girl you once were was now unattainable. You told yourself that the person you became was a mistake, a product of your parents wishful thinking. Who you were for 18 years was not who you really were, and so you set out to create something new. You changed your political views and your preference in liquor. You quit smoking Marlboros and started smoking American Spirits. You turned down Bon Jovi and turned up Bon Iver. You drank more and called home less, fucked more and prayed less. You were independent and life was moving fast enough to keep you distracted and the constant distraction kept you temporarily content.

Eventually you graduated, your duty ended, you quit your job. Suddenly life slowed down and you were forced to reevaluate who you were and who you were becoming. You turned 25 and realized that what you had created couldn’t last. Your friends became husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. You became jaded and angry, complacent and somber. You had a degree, a skill set, work experience. Yet, you ignored them and let them collectively gather dust. You associated your accomplishments with your failures. You tried to reinvent yourself, you made new friends, you made new goals. You smoked less, drank less, fucked less. You cared more, loved more, dreamed more.

You turned 30 and decided to settle down. You knew your spouse didn’t complete you yet, but one day they would and you'd be grateful for the difficult times, because they gave way to the beautiful times. You got a job and excelled in your career and moved up in your profession. Your pay increased, your waistline expanded, and you began realize to that you had too much wealth to only share with two lovely people. So you decided to have children. They looked like you and they smelled like you. You loved them. You raised them the best you could, but somehow you felt it wasn't good enough. They yelled at you like you yelled at your parents and your heart broke for them like your parent’s hearts broke for you.

Eventually your children left for university and you feared they would smoke more, drink more, fuck more. You never asked but you always knew. You worried they were never content, because no one is at that age, and if they say they are, it’s almost always a lie. You and your spouse sold your home and a bought a small cottage far from the city and close to nature. You had a spare room for when your children came to visit, but they rarely did. The sheets and pillows on the bed remained crisp and in place. Dust gathered in their absence and the room felt cold each time you passed it. Christmas became the unspoken mandatory gathering and grudgingly they came home to a house they didn't know and opened presents and gave smiles that seemed forced. This was their sixth paragraph and you knew they needed to find out the ending on their own. You stood ready to catch them if they fell, but thankfully they never did.

You reached a half century and as you stepped back to evaluate the first 50 years of your life your gut sank to the floor. Life was both slow and unrelenting. Your marriage was okay — not perfect — but okay. You confused your complacency with safety and settled deeper into your bitterness.

A few more years passed and you snapped. The cottage was suffocating. The thick layer of dust on the guest bed left you feeling unwanted as a parent and unsuccessful as a homemaker. You bought a car that went too fast and cost too much because you hoped it would pump life into you just as it pumped oil into its engine. And for a brief moment it did. You drove it up the coast and felt the wind snap at your hand as you held it out of the lowered window. You swam in the glory of it all, but eventually the water grew stagnant and the newness of the moment fell away. You parked it in the garage and only took it out when you remembered, and you rarely remembered.

You became a grandparent soon after. A beautiful little girl. Her name meant lovely and her smile meant serenity. You were in love for the first time in a long time. You held her in your aging arms and felt the innocence of her spirit transfer to you. This is what you had forgotten. This is what you had been looking for, although up until this moment, you didn't know you were searching. This is what you needed.

On your last day at the company, your coworkers made you a cake. You laughed at the thought that years of toil and stress, late nights and early mornings, thinning hair and bagging eyes, had culminated to this moment. A chocolate cake send off, complete with a red frosted, cursive thank you. You looked around the room and your smile faded. You were thirty years older than many around you. They were so fucking young. They had their entire lives ahead of them and yet here they were working in a box with the hope of a chocolate cake somewhere off in the distance. You left the cake untouched and excused yourself. Without saying goodbye you retrieved the final belongings from your desk and snuck out the back door.

You ran. It was the only thing you knew how to do anymore. The last half of your sixties was slow and the running made it seem to go by more quickly. Whenever you lost your breath and the beating in your chest became too much, you would stop and sit down. It didn't matter where you were, just that you sat. You sat in a bank parking lot, at a bus stop, in a park, in the middle of an open air mall. People thought nothing of your peculiar habit, because people rarely thought of other people in your part of the world.

One day you decided to stop and sit down and not get up. You traded your running shoes for a leather recliner and a cable box and you decided you would never run again. Your health dwindled and your weight soared. You didn’t care. Your spouse worried that you were depressed and this made you angry. You fought more than you ever did. About little things. Things that didn't matter. Where the peanut butter was kept. Who made the bed. Why the grass hadn't been cut in weeks. You mumbled your thoughts and cursed at the television and the newspaper. You began to question your purpose outside of a cubicle and a steady paycheck. Life moved treacherously slow with an extra eight hours each day.

Your seventies came and you learned that the pain in your lungs wasn't from the running years of your sixties but from cancer, caused by the Marlboros and American Spirits of your youth. It grew rapidly and despite their best intentions, the doctors could not curb its devastation. Your extermination was inevitable .

This newfound mortality gave way to a kindness you had nearly forgotten you possessed. You made love to your spouse more, called your children and their children more, you took the car up the coast one last time, and you ran. You ran without stopping. You passed the bank parking lot, the bus stop, the park, and the open air mall. You stopped at the sudden sight of a cemetery and lost your breath. The beating in your chest became too much and so you sat down in front of its wrought iron gates. And as you sat on the cold earth that would soon take you back, you wept. You wept like waves crash and the tide of your tears rolled in heavy until at long last you felt at peace.

Life gave you four more years after your diagnosis. You saw your granddaughter graduate high school. You made sure to pull her aside and tell her your fears and mistakes, and hoped she wouldn't make the same ones. On the drive home from the ceremony you glanced over at your spouse and kissed them on the cheek. You felt butterflies in your stomach, reminding of the first the two of you kissed and for a moment you forgot you were dying.

Then you died.

It happened on a Sunday morning. You wandered quietly from your bed, made a cup of coffee and walked down the driveway to retrieve the Sunday paper. You were weak at this point, the chemotherapy had taken its toll on you. You rarely left the house anymore and the morning sun felt warm on your cold and sore skin. As you reached down to pick up the newspaper, you felt your chest tighten and your breathing slow. You sat down and waited for the moment to pass. But it never did. The coffee mug came swiftly out of your hand and fell to the ground in a million little pieces. Your heart stopped pumping blood and the clock began to count backwards.

Fifteen seconds. You looked back at the life you had led. It was a quiet one. You were twenty-four once, so full of dreams. So fucking full. But you let them fade behind the challenges of being young and naive, poor and confused, too small in a world too big.

Ten seconds. You wished hadn't been so afraid to share what you created. You stashed away your writing or your music or your art, because you were unsure of what people would think.

Five seconds. You wished you had loved sooner and cared more deeply. You waited too long to marry and even longer to be truly vulnerable. No one knew the real you, the terrified you, the confused you. You hid it all behind awkward humor and staged confidence because it was easier and more attractive.

Five seconds turned to one. You took in a shallow breath, closed your eyes, and in that final moment realized that the value of one’s life is not measured by his or her regrets, but by the way they love, the way they teach, and the way they choose to share their lives with those around them. Your life wasn’t about you. It was about choosing to love the same person for the rest of your life. It was about choosing to bring children into the world and love them more than you loved yourself. It was about raising them the best you could and being there for them no matter what. It was about working hard to support those who depended on you. It was about passing the wisdom found in your own mistakes to those who came after you. You dreamed, you created, and you loved. Maybe not the way you thought you should, but you did, and that is what truly mattered.

One second turns to zero.

You are dead. There is silence. There is darkness. Your brain has given up and soon your body will follow. The vessel your soul left behind will slowly break apart, cell by cell, until it has given itself back to the earth that created it.

It was worth it.

Photo credit: Timothy Brown