Feeling Mortal

Not dead yet.

After my last couple of posts, you might think I’m teetering on my last legs. That’s not the case. I feel fine. There’s no question that my recent diagnosis has been a wake up call. I’m going to die. Hopefully not too soon, but it will happen. I’ve known this, of course, but I don’t think I’ve really felt it before, at least not to this degree. After my first heart scan, I was in shock. I’ve got what?!?

Photo by Julia Kadel on Unsplash

After my recent experience watching my friend Greg die, I have been acutely aware of how quickly it can happen, and how the losses pile up. The first things to go were all his hopes and dreams. He had plans, even if they weren’t all concrete ones — travel, days in the sun, fun with loved ones, a normal life.

It makes me think about how this new health scare will play out. I think about all the books that I want to read, all the conversations I want to have, and all the ways I would like to experience life. Then there are the people I care so much about. Will I have time for those relationships?

Another friend was traveling overseas and had a heart attack. She is recovering, thank God, but it just reinforces the idea that anything can happen at any time. We think we have time to do the things we want to do, but we may not.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

I sometimes ask my clients the question, “If you had only one week (or day, or hour) to live, what would you do?” It is a question designed to discover your priorities. What is important to you, and what are you ignoring as you go through your daily routines?

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean —
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down —
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?

https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2015/6/29/the-summer-day

Maybe the most important thing that came to mind as I thought about my mortality was the big question: Is it true? Is there life beyond this life? As much as I believe this, as much as I have dedicated my life to belief in God, there is still doubt, because none of us can prove it. I go back to the scriptures and I can only imagine the awe and the amazement of the first disciples who witnessed the resurrection, and almost immediately there is a part of my brain that wonders if it is true. The historical record shows that thousands and thousands of people radically changed their lives — and what else could do that?

We will never truly know, of course. That’s why we call it faith. There are other possibilities — our lives after death may be so different as to be unrecognizable. Our spirits may go on in ways that we cannot imagine. What I am beginning to understand more clearly than ever is that my time to live in this way, in this body, in this moment in history, is limited, and I better figure out what I want to do with it.