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2001-10-10 | 9:27 a.m.

Been thinking.

Okay, lemme back up a little. I was reading this article in Rosie magazine (yeah, whatever) and it really spoke to me. I'm going to quote a big chunk of it here so I'll remember it.

The background for this excerpt is that the writer, therapist Lauren Slater, has been treating a dying patient named Mary who is facing death with a kind of flair or self-possession that Slater, deeply afraid of death, cannot fathom.

During one of our last meetings, I said to her, "How could you not be at all afraid to die?"

"Death," said Mary, "is something to be done with style, and fear is not fashionable."

I squinted at her. "You mean to tell me that for you, death is a trip to some huge mall?"

"No," she said. "But you should leave with some sparkle, don't you think? Besides, the thing is, Lauren, I have raised two excellent sons. I have grandsons and a whole family who love me. When I look back, I see I have survived terrible trauma and learned to love despite it, and the funny thing is, the deeper you love, the easier it is to leave."

Of course she's right. We do not fear death so much as a poorly lived life. Mary brought this home to me in a new way. My terror has to do not with what lies on the other side, but with what's here, in front of me, now, and all the ways I refuse it. The urge for perfection, the driven desire to work. All the times I have placed materialism over relationship, have not listened well to friends or family. In this, I am like everyone, no better, no worse. However, a sin is no less small because it is ordinary. I use the word sin in its original meaning: not to do wrong, but to miss the mark. That afternoon, when I asked Mary why she was not afraid to die and she told me it had to do with love, she also said something else that has stayed with me. "Every time, Lauren," she said, "every time you are with a person, you are with a dying person. It's not just me, it's everyone. Remember that, and all your senses will sharpen."

As Mary came to the end of her days, I started buying books about the subject. One struck me in particular, Stephen Levine's A Year to Live (Three Rivers Press). In it, he suggests you actively imagine this year is your last. Of course, this is not a book about how to die, but about how to live, how to whittle down your barbed regrets, fish out the fibs and the toxic white lies. In my last year of life, I tried to do things so I might see what dignity really means. These things are hard to write about, because they are so simple and so close to clich�. In my last year, for instance, I planted a tree. I yo-yoed, perfecting the dips and spins and around-the-worlds in my own meditative stance. I learned how to give pedicures, and then I did them for my friends, touching them in ways I never had before. I made love differently, less drifting off, less routinized, and one night, just after Mary sank into a coma, my husband and I lobbed my diaphragm out the bathroom window, watched it Frisbee like a small white spaceship through the night and land with a soundless plop somewhere in the grass.

Okay, now. This is actually an ethic with which I am familiar, and I wouldn't say that I have been living too far afield of it. But the way it was expressed here reanimated the ideas for me--especially Mary's comments about how it's easier to leave when you're confident that have loved generously and well. It should be obvious, and it should be paramount, but it's not. It hasn't always been. When I was younger, I got in the habit of remarking to friends, "What do I want it to say on my tombstone? 'She made her bed'?" I've always thought of myself as hurtling toward death. But my response to it, especially lately, has been anxiety about what remains undone rather than simply doing, living, loving, without fear or panic, one moment at a time, til death do us part.

Well, I have more to say on this subject but I'm going to take a break and do some "doing" instead.

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