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We are on the big college tour right now,
which has a funny rhythm of me at the front of the room teaching at a couple of
universities and Naomi and me at the back of the touring pack at a bunch of
other ones. It’s a little bit of identity whiplash to go from guest lecturer to
anxious mother, but that’s what this week looks like.
Yesterday, after lunch in the Swarthmore
dining hall, I opened a fortune cookie and was advised: Live each day as if it was your last. Letting slide the bad verb
tense, I have been puzzling over the ways my cancer experience leans me in this
direction and also pulls me away.
The clearest example was my friend Nicki
who was diagnosed with cancer in November 2013 and whose memorial service was
one year ago today. I watched first as she was thinking she didn’t have as much
time as she thought, so she cut back on work and threw herself into her PhD
dissertation. Then she realized she had less than a year and she put aside her
PhD dissertation and began filing memory boxes for her kids—letters to open on
their graduation and wedding days, letters to their children she would never
see. And then, when it was clear she had only weeks left, putting aside even
that level of planning for the future and instead just sitting and having cups of
tea with friends and family members, taking pleasure in doing the cryptic
crossword puzzles or being read to by people who loved her.
So I get what it looks like to live each
day as if it were your last. It means loving the sun on your face. It means hearing
the voice of the people you love as a caress. It means a full kind of presence
in your right now—the only time we have for sure.
And I’m also on this college tour with
Naomi. If we were really living each day as though it were actually our last,
we’d be surrounded by family enjoying the moment instead of wandering in the
rain through liberal arts colleges she might attend in 18 months. I wouldn’t be saving for retirement. I might
stop exercising (ok, to be honest I for sure would stop exercising).
I wrote about this question more than a
year ago: How do you make sense of the
envelope of your life when some of the odds change, but you still can’t
possibly know what might be next? I am in remission now and I hope to stay
in remission forever. My doctor says the odds of my slipping out of remission
are the highest in the next three to five years, but I have a friend whose
sister slipped out of remission 30 years later. We are seriously in the space
of the not knowable.
And yet, I keep picking away at the future
as if I can use this new unknowable set in more helpful ways. When I was
thinking about my tattoo, I told Melissa it would be worth going through the
pain of getting it if I were going to live more than 5 years, but if I were
only going to live 2 more years, it wouldn’t be worth it. She would have raised
one eyebrow at me (if only she knew how) in her disapproval of that —and surely
that’s an absurd way to be doing the calculations of my life. And yet
mindlessly I find myself holding these different envelopes and wondering: Would
I begin my next book earlier or later depending on the envelope of my life?
Would I travel so much if I thought I had only five more years? (Or would I
travel more?) If I knew I had 40 more years, how would I think differently
about saving for retirement? A friend with stage 3 breast cancer tells me that
she just zones out when people talk about a plan for the distant future; she
spent the money they were saving for a beach house (someday) on a trip overseas
with her family (now); one she can be sure she’ll enjoy, the other she not sure
she wants to wait for.
This calculus is in some ways helpful and
in other ways crazymaking. Some of the answer is just letting myself live in
the knowledge that I can’t know: My choices today might turn out to be bad ones
if an unexpected future arises, but I will have to judge these choices with the
ruler I had in the moment I made them. We know from Dan Gilbert’s work that we
are constitutionally bad at making decisions that are good for our future
selves, so there’s no reason to believe I’d be better at that under these circumstances
than under others.
Perhaps this first year in remission reminds
me that I’m in a dance always between the past, the future, and the present, and
that it’s a dance I want to continue to be mindful about. I want to hold on to
those parts of my past that bring me delight to remember—or bring me learning
to enrich who I am and how I think. I want to hold on to those parts of the
future that bring me hope in a dark time, or that call me to be just a little
bigger than I can imagine today. And while I don’t know what it means in
practice to “live every day as if it was my last,” I do know how to savour a cup of Burdicks hot chocolate, to be
enraptured by the buds on the UVA campus, to feel grateful for the dinner with
Bob, to relish the time in the hotel room with Naomi sleeping quietly in the
next bed. I don’t know how many days I’ll get; neither do you. Some of those
days will be filled with the petals of cherry blossoms, and some will have fog
is so thick I can’t see the taillights of the car in front of me. But even foggy
days are part of the magic of my life, the magic that all of us are alive
today, the magic that this day is not
our last day, that we get the hope for a sunnier tomorrow.
Here's the spectacular poem of the day:
Shoulders
Naomi
Shihab Nye,
1952
A man crosses the
street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
This man carries the world's most sensitive cargo
but he's not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy's dream
deep inside him.
We're not going to be able
to live in this world
if we're not willing to do what he's doing
with one another.
We have had friends stay with us this weekend, with their two little children--4 1/2 years and 10 months. How glorious to have the house filled with little voices, and how grateful I am for the voices of my own children as we laugh and talk at dinner time. So tonight a poem to mark all that there is to feel grateful for, when the earth doesn't move, and the bombs don't explode, and there is peace and the scent of crepes and the laughing of children of all ages.
