Patti Digh - Life Is a Verb: 37 Days to Wake Up, Be Mindful, and Live Intentionally

WHY 37 DAYS?

Time only seems to matter when its running out.Peter Strup

At some point in your life, youll only have thirty-seven days to live. Maybe that day is today. Maybe not.

Such a day arrived on October 24, 2003, for a 6-foot, 5-inch-tall man with a southern accent, a golfers tan, five World War II Bronze Stars, and a forest-green Lincoln Town Car. On that beautiful autumn day, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He died just thirty-seven days later.

That man was my stepfather, Boyce. I helped him liveand diein those brief days between diagnosis and death, a process that prompted me to ask, What would I be doing today if I only had thirty-seven days to live?

My mother and I cared for him at home, since he wanted to die there. Never having been around someone dying, I didnt know what to do. When my father died more than two decades before, I was just twenty and in the intensive care waiting room, not beside him. No one asked if I wanted to be with him as he died; they just asked if I wanted to see him dead after it was all over. It was the beginning of a long realization of how intensively we avoid death in this culture.

Helping Boyce die was at once profound and awkward, as if visiting a place I ought not to be, hearing things I ought not hear, dispensing morphine as if I knew how. He very soon lost the ability to speak, which made it both easier and harder for me. I was scared and anxious all the time, never knowing what was coming next. There was no manual I could find, no prescription for what he was feeling and doing, for how his insides were eating him up. I couldnt tell, and he couldnt tell me, either.

Everything I could think to talk to him about was so petty it was painful. Would he like to watch a movie? Id pantomime the questionthen think, What, and chance Hugh Grant being the last thing he sees on earth? The newspaper failed, too, its contents hardly relevant, a mere deflection. But what was appropriate in this important, liminal spacethe gap between life and death?

At night I could hear the oxygen machines pistons moving in and out, and I waited for it to stop. Finally it did, after his feet started turning blue and that blueness marched all the way up him, thirty-seven days after the awful diagnosis.

The time frame of thirty-seven days made an impression on me. We often live as if we have all the time in the world, but the definite-ness of thirty-seven days was striking. So short a time, as if all the regrets and joys of a life would barely have time to register before it was up.

If I had thirty-seven days left, would I spend my time cleaning the attic, purging computer files, or attending committee meetings? Would I have passed on my stories to my children and friends, or would I spend those days regretting not having time to do so? Am I living fully now, or am I waiting until after the kids leave for college or my annuity matures or the Colts move back to Baltimore? It will be too late then.

I tried to reconcile the fact that this fearful death was happening with the understanding that I needed to make something good out of it. What emerged was a commitment to ask myself this question every morning: What would I be doing today if I only had thirty-seven days to live?

Some days its a hard question.

Ten years before, one of my favorite college professors died when he was only forty-six. A brilliant physicist, Sheridan Simon was a man with considerable charm and humor; we had stayed in touch since my graduation more than a decade earlier. Sheridans doctors told him he had a year to live. Do whatever you want in that year, they said. And so he did.

His friend and fellow professor Jonathan Malino eulogized Sheridan at his death: He continued to live the very life he had been leading before his illness. This was his life. His account of his days, his heart of wisdom, lay in the very passions and commitments which he embodied daily. Day by day, this determination not to run away from his life took more and more courage. The pain increased. The exhaustion mounted. And yet, just three nights before his death, Sheridan was still in the classroom, still reaching out to others, still using every bit of his energy to make the lives of others better.

I got a last letter from Sheridan just eight days before he died; he closed it with these words: Be in touch, OK? Love, Sheridan.

Journalist Marjorie Williams died of liver cancer three days after turning forty-seven. As an act of mourning, her husband compiled her final essays in a book titled The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Having found myself faced with that old bull-session question (What would you do if you found out you had a year to live?), I learned that a woman with children has the privilege or duty of bypassing the existential. What you do, if you have little kids, is lead as normal a life as possible, only with more pancakes.

Like Sheridan Simon and Marjorie Williams, my answer to that bull-session question wasnt about uprooting my family to take a world tour. It wasnt about climbing Mount Everest or learning Urdu once and for all or seeking enlightenment in a faraway land.