Many people say they want to die in their sleep or just go
quickly. I don’t. Or at least I didn’t until a couple of years ago when a good
friend died. Now I’m on the fence. Though dying in my sleep is still
terrifying, the idea of going quickly is gaining ground. My friend Chuck was an
amazing man. At 70 he had had a few different careers, a couple of marriages, a
bunch of kids. He’d biked across country and canoed a 90-mile race through the
Adirondacks many times. He was on a “streak” of running at least a mile every
single day, and his streak had lasted more than 20 years. Even on that
cross-country bike trip, after a 100-mile day, he would jog his mile before
bed. He was a reader and a writer. Retired, he read as much as he could and built
himself a little log cabin in his backyard that was his writing studio, where
he turned out short stories. At the time of his death, he was in a happy
relationship, living in a beautiful place, doing all the things he loved to do.
In short, from my perspective, his life was perfect. Then one day he came back
from a run, got in the shower and dropped dead.
Until then, I had been pretty sure I wanted to die of
cancer. I wanted to know I was going
to die so I’d have time to come to terms with it. And I wanted to be in so much
pain that I would actually want to
die. I would have suffered enough. (As a Jew, I’m not sure it is possible to
suffer enough; but at least I would be in enough pain to consider death the
better alternative.)
When Chuck died, though, I began to reconsider. I felt in my heart that he had died the perfect death. He was living his life exactly the way he wanted to. He never had to suffer the indignities of growing old or the pain and disability that eventually would have ended his running streak. He was in the shower – and I know how good a shower feels after working out. He was tired but pleased with himself for doing it one more day. He was getting clean. Life was good. And then life just wasn’t there anymore.
Clearly Chuck had truly lived.
But had he lived enough? I wish
we could know what he thought about this. I would bet he would say no, that he
wanted to stay with Barb, keep reading, writing, running, biking, canoeing – living. On the other hand, if he had
been given a choice between this death or a death 15 years later, infirm and in
pain, which would he have chosen? Which would you choose?
According to Kierkegaard (I think), the meaning of life is
that it ends. Without the knowledge that this body will not last forever, I
could do anything and know that if it didn’t work out I could just do something
else. No harm, no foul. Try again and again. Who cares? Blah blah blah.
By the way, in case you were wondering, I am not dying, nor
do I plan to die any time soon. I am living a good life. As I’ve written many
times, I am blessed with everything I need and just about everything I could
want. I don’t have a “bucket list”. Yes, I’m living a crazy life, but I want to
keep doing it forever. I don’t care if it makes my life meaningless. I just don’t
think I will ever have lived enough.
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