Buying the Farm

It’s recently come to my attention that, one of these days, I’m going to die. Which isn’t to say that I’ve become paranoid about it. I haven’t. I don’t look in the bathroom mirror every morning and see the Grim Reaper peering over my shoulder, idly tapping the haft of his scythe against the palm of his hand; I don’t imagine that my usual morning stiffness is a presentiment of rigor mortis; and I certainly don’t consult bus schedules trying to figure out whether it’ll be the 55 or the 72 that flattens me today. But I am starting to come to terms with the truth of my mortality, to see it as a real, tangible, present thing. I didn’t before, which is probably ok. It’s not a good idea to be too comfortable with the notion of death when you’re in your twenties, and just learning how to live.

But the sad truth is that you can’t spend your entire life ignoring the edge of your mortal coil. We live in a universe of opposites, where things are meaningful only in the light cast by their antonyms. Good isn’t good unless it’s got bad to measure itself against; sad isn’t sad without happy. And life — the real sense of life — loses a lot of its luster without the shadow of death looming on the horizon.

Anne Lamott tells a story about a good friend of hers who was diagnosed with cancer. Lamott called her friend’s doctor, some six months before she died, to ask whether there was any hope. The answer was no. “But watch her carefully right now,” the doctor said, “because she’s teaching you how to live.”

So the trick is to live every day as if you’re dying, which, as Lamott points out, you are. In practice, though, this is very hard to do. Because try as you might to wrap your arms around your life and squeeze everything you can out of it in the time you have left, the details always get in the way. There are dogs to walk and forms to fill out and taxes to pay and commutes to make. There’s food to be put on tables, and roofs to be mounted over heads. It’s tempting to tell the details to go fuck themselves, but, really, those little bastards are like Pac Man ghosts: if you eat the right dot, you can turn them into little blue pansies and hound them to their death, but they’ll always come back, no matter how many times you kill them.

Of course, if you’re really lucky, you’ll find a way to discover enough simple joy in the details to sustain you until you buy the farm. And, if you’re really really really lucky, you’ll be so preoccupied with enjoying those details that, when your time comes, you’ll have taken a couple of steps off the precipice into thin air — Wile E. Coyote style — before you realize that it’s all over. And then you’ll plummet, arms and legs spread out like the Vitruvian man’s, staring up at everything you left behind; and thinking, just before you turn into a tiny little mushroom cloud at the bottom of the canyon, that maybe, just maybe, you did things right.