Barbara Becker - Heartwood

Statistically my time was up at least a year ago. But Im still here, wrote my childhood friend Marisa at the top of her Facebook note titled 25 Random Things About Me. I had read and reread her list so many times Id nearly committed it to memory.

Marisa and I met the day her family moved onto our street in suburban New Jersey. She was the curly-haired little sister in a gregarious Italian Catholic family. I was a stringy-haired bookwormthe oldest sibling in a family of reserved Protestants. Her brother was inseparable from my brothers, and our parents barbecued together while we played hide-and-seek in the woods on summer nights.

Marisa discovered the marble-sized mass in her left breast ten months before her wedding to her college sweetheart, David. She was thirty. After a lumpectomy, a dozen rounds of chemotherapy, and thirty radiation sessions, Marisa and David said their vows while my mother passed a packet of tissues down the church pew. They donated a portion of their wedding gifts to cancer research and settled into a tidy brick home on Philadelphias Main Line.

Meanwhile, I had married my own David. We had two sons and lived in a New York City apartment cluttered with books and toys. We were hectic but happy. I saw Marisa at our families annual Christmas dinners in New Jersey; mostly we kept in touch online.

By the time Marisa was thirty-nine, the cancer was in her liver, spine, skull, ribs, hip, and lymph nodes. She responded by focusing on what gave her joy. Small things, like #12 of her Facebook Random Things listIm addicted to Us Weeklyand #15s Raisinets. Davids love warranted two entries: #6I think my husband is the funniest person I know. And the most loyaland #25I believe my husband and I were truly meant for each other.

Marisas struggle made me profoundly unsettled. After reading her list for the first time, I began waking up at 3 A.M., trying to catch my breath. In our darkened bedroom, Id sit against the headboard, knees pulled up to my chest, and think about mortalityMarisas and my own.

To ease the anxiety, I read. I devoured so many books about lifes purpose that my husband began shaking his head every time I came home from the library with a new one. As a young girl, I had taken an uncanny interest in my fathers colorful six-book set on world religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Catholicism, and Protestantism), which opened a vast and exhilarating universe of beliefs and rituals that existed beyond our small town. He had told me he bought the set so he could learn more about his colleagues at the local hospital, who came from all over the globe. Now, as if channeling my younger self, I began to search broadly for words of wisdom on life, death, and meaning. I discovered that seekers and sages from Henry David Thoreau to the mystical poet Rumi to the Dalai Lama have long implored us to live with the end ever-present in our minds. A review of scientific studies claimed that thinking about mortality could actually be good for re-prioritizing goals and values. Even Apples Steve Jobs asserted, Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Lifes change agent.

In a move I thought would make Marisas playful eyes rollthat is, if I had told her about itI decided to test this wisdom by living a year of my life as if it were my last. While I was not in the habit of praying, each morning I would close my eyes and dedicate my experiment to Marisa. Then I would fill in the blank: I dont want to die without

After Marisa wrote to tell me how ecstatic she was about a family vacation in Italy she had taken between chemo sessions, I booked a trip to Turkey, which I had been putting off until my kids were older. Hadnt I read that people often go to their end regretting things they did not do far more than regretting some of the things they did do? I was determined not to make that mistake. In Istanbul, Dave, the boys, and I drank fresh-squeezed pomegranate juice on cobblestone streets and watched the whirling dervishes spin into a tranceone outstretched palm turned upward to receive graces from the heavens, the other facing downward to pass them on to earth.

Next, I tackled work. I used my flexibility as a strategic-communications consultant to develop a pro-bono campaign for refugees in North Africa. My income shrank, but my days felt purposeful. I went on a ten-day silent meditation retreat, planted tulip and daffodil bulbs in a sooty plot in the shade of the Williamsburg Bridge, and snapped at my kids less, imagining each interaction could be our last. Dave and I held hands watching Saturday Night Live reruns.

Slowly I understood that my quest was an invitation to participate more fully in everyday matters. While I had initially been looking for meaning along the banks of the Bosporus Strait in Istanbul, answers were just as easily found in my newly flowering garden, where elevated trains rumbled on tracks overhead. Meditating at home on a floor strewn with Legos felt even more useful than sitting on a perfectly aligned cushion in a serene hall. I cried openly and often for Marisa and her family and in gratitude for her unwitting gift to me.

Toward the end of my 365-day experiment, Marisas doctors told her there was nothing more they could do. I arranged a babysitter and drove to her parents house, where she was staying. You might think sitting with someone who is dying means you will be having big conversations about the meaning of life, a hospice chaplain had advised me. Wrong! Sometimes, all thats called for is to just show up and watch