Stacy was not supposed to die. She was a healthy, middle-aged woman; she had lively conversations with me and my parents, and she lived life with a certain contagious verve. She ran marathons, she laughed uproariously, she danced in the hallways like no one was watching.
But then she got brain cancer. Within months she was debilitated, confined to a wheelchair pushed by a nurse, no longer in control of her own body. I remember, about a year and a half after she was diagnosed, she experienced a series of convulsions—eyes wide, babbling nonsensical words, crumpled on the apartment hallway she used to dance on. I watched, mouth agape, through a crack in my apartment’s door as my dad rushed out to help her. Stacy was not supposed to die. It made her death all the more tragic.
***
Two summers ago, I worked at a probate court. The first estate hearing is as vivid a memory as I’ll ever possess.
A tearful woman narrated to the judge how her husband had brushed off his various maladies and afflictions for the twenty-some years they’d been married, until he one day felt a pain in his groin so intense that he was rushed off to an emergency room, bellowing in agony. He was diagnosed with stage-4 testicular cancer hours later. He died by the week’s end.
***
By the end of my experience, I concluded that a person dies four times: the first when his heart stops beating; the second when his estate file in probate court is closed; the third when the heart of the last person who knew him stops beating; and the fourth when his name is, for the last time, spoken or read.
I would never have expected that, a year later, the probate court almost opened my own estate file.
But Death had another plan for me yet. He gave me a new lease on life.
***
I’m climbing a mountain. Taking a path well-trodden, charted by expeditioners long before my time. I weather the harsh winds, the frigid conditions, the dearth of food and water—and I finally reach the snow-capped peak, elated with my success.
A few moments later, out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse expeditioners climbing a larger, even more demanding mountain. This is only a subsidiary peak.
Those expeditioners are hiking a trail charted by expeditioners before them, the latter hiking a trail charted by expeditioners before them; the peaks become taller, the trails increasingly winding, the conditions more oppressive. Every time I notice the expeditioners ahead of me, their numbers have dwindled; the others, unable to sustain the pace and pressures of the lives expected of them, must have fallen off the mountain.
When will I?
***
On New Year’s Day, I started a book called The Strength of the Few. It’s the second installment in James Islington’s Hierarchy series, a saga in equal parts science fiction and fantasy, set in a time and place greatly reminiscent of Ancient Rome.
Somewhere around page 300, a friend of the protagonist tells him, “They say that young men know they will die, but only old men believe it.”
Some of us are old, in that sense; we believe that we will die. We have developed an acute understanding that we are living on borrowed time. The old who have waged wars with their own minds make the additional choice, every day, whether explicitly or subconsciously, to get the fuck up and live.
Only when we believe that we will die, only when we accept the essential and sole fact of our existence, can we truly start to live. Only then can we engage in the necessary but incredibly arduous introspection from which might erupt mountains of our own making.
When we trudge through our time like there’s no end in sight, like we have thousands of lifetimes to live—well, that’s not living at all. And you don’t have to have your own brush with death to believe it.
In the words of essayist and critic Walter Pater, “we have an interval, and then our place knows us no more.” The question that each and every one of us must ask ourselves is: how shall I fill, or perhaps even expand, this interval? And when will I start to truly live?