‘Til Death Do Us Part
It was a hot July morning in Napa, way too early for NY to be calling. Please, please, please, no more bad news…
Michael was still grappling with his diagnosis when a client invited him to Napa. Naturally, I tagged along. A few picturesque days in wine country offered the promise of meaningful nourishment before chemo the following week.
It’s 11am on the west coast when my phone trumpets Romeo & Juliette, Op.64, Dance of the Knights. I stiffen. Alarmed my daughter is calling so early on a Saturday morning, I bypass “hello” in favor of an urgently spoken “What’s wrong?!” Silence, then muffled giggles. “Ma, did you see my text? “No,” I respond. “What text? Hold on.” “Mom, look at my text!” she implores. “OMG omg omg!! Are you engaged? Oh sweetheart, how wonderful.”
In that nanosecond, I exhaled and made a deal with God. Please, give us time, we need to get to the wedding, the father-daughter dance.
If I were to identify one regret, the if I could change anything about my life regret, it would be about not having slowed down to savor all the little ordinary moments that accumulated over the course of my lifetime. I never recognized how my natural pace got in the way of archiving these precious moments until our collective and individual stories suddenly included a time stamp.
Thirty-six months. That’s how long I’ve been negotiating the question posed in Steven Levine’s 1998 book, A Year To Live: How to Live This Year As If It Were Your Last. Thirty-six months has been the period when life adopted a rather gauzy, undefined silhouette. It’s the period of time when the possibility of hope distracted my husband, so sickened by the cure, that it took everything he had just to make it through another day. The period when the improbability of remission turned into a glorious dance, and then retreated.
There are no easy or fast answers to the year to live question, only considerations. We’re both struggling to identify what it is that continues to keep us at arms length from reaching a satisfactory conclusion. While he’s slowly entering into a dialog with mortality, I’m learning on a daily basis how to get better at being death literate.
There is no roadmap for this.
Yet, because I chose death literacy, long before the end, I’m grateful to have had the allotted time to consider the question and talk about whatever comes up. The conflicts, the considerations — the part of me that is now forced to shelter in place because caregivers don’t have the luxury of making plans or dreaming about next year’s vacation.
Pondering Levine’s what if question has been a powerful teacher. It’s pushed me into a very uncomfortable corner. Knowing what I know now, how indeed am I going to order my agenda in the coming days, weeks and months?
One thing that continues to rise to the surface is a need to accommodate more as the only solution to keep all of this going. It’s a non-negotiable choice because I made a no-matter-what-it-takes commitment to make death literacy a household term in America and Bevival.com the place where one can start learning. Because you can’t abandon what you started has left me sprinting forward, just as I’ve always done. Only this time, I’m sleeping with one eye open, hoping not to overlook a meaningful moment along the way.
