They say that death and taxes are the only certainties in life, but that’s only half right. There might be, somewhere, a universe where taxes don’t exist; death will never not be an inescapable fact for each and every living thing. I don’t want to be a downer, nor do I want to sound glib. Death is so fundamentally alien to our living experience that it becomes an abstraction. I no longer remember the exact moment I realized, as a child, that I wasn’t going to be alive forever, but I remember how shattering and profoundly life-changing that moment was. My entire conception of the world changed in an instant. Even so, death remained an abstraction. I tried to imagine myself dead and failed, time and again. There is a bit in Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead where the titular characters – lovably dim and perpetually befuddled by a world that moves them around like pawns on a chess board, without warning or explanation – discuss what it might be like to be dead, buried in a coffin. I’ve always loved that dialogue because it captures so well my own attempts to grapple with the idea of death as an “event” of life.
But, of course, death isn’t that.
It’s not a milepost in one’s life, like a birthday or a wedding. You don’t arrive at it and then depart again, on to the next thing. Death isn’t a part of life at all. It is the dark side of the moon; always there but never seen. Until one day, it is. It doesn’t come. It just is.
My understanding of death – and life – profoundly shifted again when my mom died. I had lost family members and friends before; what made her death different wasn’t simply that she was one of the most important people in my life, but how and when it happened. My mom had just turned 66 when she died, barely six weeks after she received her pancreatic cancer diagnosis, which came as a thunderbolt out of blue skies. Other people in my life have battled cancer; some are still here, and some are not, but in every case, they were given options for medical treatment. We are so fortunate to live in an age when medical science is making amazing strides all the time; in many cases, no matter how scary a diagnosis might be, there is something that can be done, or at least attempted. Maybe it was mere luck that this had been my experience of life-threatening illness before my mom died, but I don’t think it’s an unusual experience for most people in the Global West, where quality of life and life expectancy are the highest they’ve ever been in the history of our species.
For my mom that didn’t matter, though. I will never forget the moment my dad called to tell me the results of her latest scans. I knew immediately that it was bad, but my mind didn’t – couldn’t – grasp at first what it meant. I remember asking my dad what the doctors said would happen next; my mom had had breast cancer years before, so I was familiar with the general treatment process – surgery, chemo, radiation, and so on. This time, there was silence on the phone. Eventually, my dad managed to speak: there was nothing to be done. The doctors hadn’t mentioned any treatment because there no treatment that could help. There would only be palliative care, when the time came. And still, my mind couldn’t – wouldn’t – understand what he was saying. I asked him over and over what he meant, what the doctors meant, what it all meant. It seemed impossible that there was nothing to be done.
Over the next six weeks, I struggled to make sense of it. For the first time in my life, death was a fact. It could not be avoided, negotiated, put off. My mom’s diagnosis left no room for hope, the one thing that might have helped to blur the finality of the prospect of her death. This is what changed me. Up to that point, I had lived my life with the unspoken belief that most bad things in life could be, if not undone, then at least fixed; even if they changed your life, life still went on. I’d spent my life living in the land of Tomorrow Always Comes. So, perhaps, had my mom. At 66, she had no reason to think herself very old. She was a vibrant, brilliant, compassionate, generous, wonderfully multi-faceted woman; a defining presence in the lives of everyone who loved and was loved by her. She was so alive. Until she wasn’t.
Grief does a lot of funny things to us. It’s a shapeshifter. Like water, it takes the shape of whomever holds it; it penetrates even the most inaccessible parts of us; it transforms as it flows, leaving a sometimes-unrecognizable landscape in its wake. Of all the things it did to me (and for me), the one thing I will never regret is the way it changed how I understand time.
It’s not only the young who live in the land of Tomorrow Always Comes. At 25, time stretched so far in front of me that it might as well have gone on forever, but you know what? At 35, that horizon felt like it had barely budged. Turning 40 didn’t bring it closer either; I was still living my life like there would always be another tomorrow. Another day to do all the things I wanted but didn’t have time to do today. Another day to try the things I’d always wanted to try but didn’t have time to try … not yesterday, or the day before, or all the yesterdays before that. If life did not, in the moment, feel anything like I’d hoped it would … well, that was ok, too. Some day – a day definitely still to come – it definitely would.
Someday, I would get around to All The Things.
I would get around to living my best life.
One day.
In fact, I had designed my entire life precisely around that guarantee. I had worked hard for nearly two decades – harder, at times, than I’d wanted to work, if we are being honest – and made some compromises that hadn’t always felt great, and missed out on things I still often thought about with regret, but it was okay because there would be a reward for it all at the end: the best life that I was going to start living … someday in the future.
Here’s the thing: human beings can’t live every day as if they’re going to die tomorrow. It’s not healthy for our psyche, and it’s not healthy for our society either. A certain amount of future planning is imperative, and the only way we know how to do that is by imagining ourselves a future life. At the same time, too much living in the future can also be unhealthy. I used to be the kind of person who was always counting down to some future event: a milestone birthday, a party, a vacation – even just a shopping trip to the mall. In fact, I had to fill up my calendar with “fun things to look forward to” in order to get through the daily grind. Let me rephrase that: I needed to reward myself for simply living my daily life. Does it sound familiar to you? I know lots of people who are the same. In my case, it wasn’t the result of circumstances forced upon me. It was my choice to live like that. Let’s call it a side effect of being more future-oriented than was healthy for me. I had a skewed notion of the value of time. Today mattered less than tomorrow. Today existed to be exploited in service of tomorrow.
But, of course, tomorrow is not guaranteed. You know how they say, one bird in the hand is worth two in the bush? I think about that a lot nowadays.
After my mom died, I didn’t start living like there was no tomorrow. I didn’t quit my job, start partying, or blow off my responsibilities. I did stop making plans for a while, though – months, in fact. Life suddenly seemed too unpredictable. What was the point of planning a vacation in six months’ time when someone could die in six weeks? And once I stopped making plans – stopped even looking at the calendar beyond the end of each week – I began to understand the meaning of living in the moment. It doesn’t mean every moment is fun or memorable, only that — good, bad or indifferent — it doesn’t pass unnoticed. Ok, maybe not every second of every minute of every day; I can get stuck in a book or an art project or a trip to the thrift store and lose hours. But you get my point. When I stopped thinking about the future all the time, the present suddenly came into focus. And in the present, I found myself.
I found other things too. Lessons, mostly.
Here’s a big one: you can’t start living your best life until you know what that looks like for you. And you won’t know that unless you get to know yourself well first. I mean really, really, LIKE FOR REAL know yourself. If your idea of the best life is (a) whatever social media tells you it is, or (b) having and doing everything under the sun that takes your fancy, you’re gonna run into trouble pretty quickly. The reality is that (a) and (b) are basically the same thing and you can’t have it. Sorry. Money is finite. Time is finite. We can’t have everything, and be everything, and do everything, all at the same time. We might be able to have and be and do anything from a very long (if not infinite) menu of options, but we have to make choices – and trade-offs. The more money, time, and effort we pour into one choice, the less we have to devote to others. The choices and the trade-offs shape our lives, for better or worse. To live your best life means to make choices that embody and create that life.
Here’s another thing I learned, living in the present: you can’t enjoy everything, all the time. And you shouldn’t try. Humans, it seems, have been hard-wired to have a happiness set-point (sometimes called the Brickman happiness baseline). Scientists have hypothesized that people have different set-points, which may be at least partially heritable and may be adjustable over a lifetime. This is relevant to our experience of pleasure in the following way: a pleasant stimulus – like getting a raise or buying a new dress – will generate a hedonic response above the person’s normal baseline (and register as happiness), while a negative stimulus will do the opposite (and register as unhappiness). But over time, the person gets used to the stimulus and returns to their happiness baseline. Nothing lasts forever: not the peaks, not the valleys. And the more we chase those peaks of happiness, the more we actually desensitize ourselves (by repeated exposure) to those stimuli that induce the experience of happiness.
Living in the moment doesn’t make me happier, but it allows me to be fully present in those moments of joy – to savour them, and then to let them go, knowing that they will come again. It also requires me to be present in those moments that feel difficult or even painful, rather than try to avoid them. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that hardships are a blessing in disguise; sometimes, they’re just really, really sh*tty and unfair. Sometimes, the difficult moments do represent opportunities to learn and grow. Even then, we don’t have to love them, but we do have to accept that – fair or not – they are part of life. And, like the highs, they too shall pass. In the meantime, there is today. And today counts.
