Who would you call?
What would you say?
Why aren't you doing it?
Death like birth is not an emergency but an emergence. Like a flower opening. It is nearly impossible to tell exactly when the bud starts to become the blossom or when the seed laden blossom begins to burst and release its bounty.
—Levine, Steven. A Year To Live. 201 East 50th Street New York, New York 10022: Crown Publishing Group, 1997.
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs studies, it — our life — hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible forever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah, if only the cataclysm doesn't happen this time, we won't miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn't happen, we don't do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn't have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are human, and that death may come this evening.
—Marcel Proust
If You Had Ten Minutes To Live
Most participants in the one day seminar on “Death & Dying” presented by Stephen Levine and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross had instant answers to the first two question. Everyone would call a loved one and say, I love you. However, there was no immediate answer to his third question. Why aren't you doing it? Why aren't we calling that loved one? Because there's always a tomorrow.
If life were on a fixed time schedule, if we all knew the moment each of us would die in the same general sense a doctor predicts the birth of a baby, I think we might live our lives differently. I believe that a sense of completion, of having been alive, would compel us to fulfill as many of our dreams as possible within the time we are allotted from birth to death. We would have Death Planners to orchestrate our final days exactly as we wish. Discount travel packages would be in order for those approaching the final phase of time. We would approach death as a celebration of the life we have lived because we would have lived every moment knowing when life would end.
Many of us take this precious gift of life for granted. The assumption, especially when we're young, is that we will live a long time, that we are indestructible. Even those of us who have lost loved ones sometimes forget how suddenly this gift can be recalled.
In the poem "Moments" I close with the line:
Each moment would have but one life, never preceded by a memory, never, ever, followed by a wish.
I quote this line because as I grow in age, I find myself living it more. The gift I have been given is life in a physical entity and the only limitation of this entity is time. I will, at an unknown point, cease to exist as this entity I've come to know as me. It doesn't matter if it is ten minutes or ten years, I don't plan to live my life any differently.
"The aim of life,” as so pointedly written by Henry Miller, “is to live, and to live means to be aware; joyously, drunkenly, serenely, divinely aware.
In the twenty years since Stephen asked those three questions. I have become more aware of the importance of each moment and live each with as much joy, gratitude and appreciation as I can muster. I am aware there is less time ahead for me than I have already lived. I am aware that this moment right now is what I have to work with because there is no guarantee of the next. Nothing new here, I am sure. I still remind myself every once in a while just how blessed I am for I am aware I truly loved.
Photo Credit: Fire & Rocks, SEPhillips, Digital Image, 2002.