Live Like You Were Dying – Nicaragua – [12/12/2011]

She said I was in my early forties,
with a lot of life before me
When a moment came that stopped me on a dime
I spent most of the next days
Looking at the x-rays
Talkin’ bout the options,
And talkin’ bout sweet time
I asked her when it sank in
That this might really be the real end
How’s it hit you when you get that kind of news?

I’ve talked a lot about how life goes on without us when we’re away. Life goes on no matter what, no matter who you are, or where you are – but every so often, something happens that drives that fact home. More-over, sometimes something happens that drives home just how precious life is, and how quickly everything can change on a dime.

I logged into facebook last night and found myself hit with the fact that one of my friends from my undergraduate days (which seem like a very long time ago sometimes), was diagnosed with cancer in November. She and I aren’t particularly close anymore, in fact, we’ve barely kept in touch over the last few years, but that didn’t stop my heart from clenching, or the tears from coming. Tears of shock I suppose more than anything. She’s barely 30 years old, not such a great deal older than me, has a husband and a family and a life that’s spread out before her with everything to offer – a kind of life that could easily have been mine, if I had gone a different direction – then overnight, all that changes, and her life becomes medical bills and hospital calls and surgery appointments. She still has everything she had before, but like an unwanted visitor on Christmas morning, suddenly she has this other…thing…

To say it threw me for a loop is an understatement.

Do I know this girl? No, not really. Not anymore – but she touched my life none-the-less, however briefly, and I would not be the person I am today without her. Just like I would not be the person I am today without any one of the random people I’ve interacted with over the past 29 years of my existence.

And she’ll be fine, which is what I keep reminding myself of, by the time I found out the news she had already been through surgery, and the doctors are quite sure they got everything. It’s just that…her situation got me to thinking about a lot of things…about how things can change, and how quickly things happen.

People tell you to shake off things, to focus on your own life and take on the problems that belong to you – but that’s not really possible, not with the world getting smaller every day. Now more than ever, one life touches so many other lives….

My mother says that my actual problem isn’t that I miss things while I’m away. It’s that I miss nothing, that I grab hold of everything, of everyone’s pain, joy, exuberance and sorrow, cling to it and try to understand it, to solve it, like it was some great puzzle that I can’t quite find the edges of. She says it’s a gift. I say that well…I’m not so sure.

What I am sure of is this: We all grow up thinking that we’re invincible on some level, despite continuing and escalating proof to the contrary. We all think that tragedy happens to other people, even those of us who have already seen too much. It’s old, and it’s a cliché, and in some ways I hate to say it but none the less: live each and every day, every single moment, as if it might be your last. Take that cruise you’ve been putting off, take your kids to fly a kite, go for ice cream, go zip lining, jump out of a perfectly good airplane, go to Disneyland, teach yourself how to knit…whatever it is that you’ve been putting off because you wouldn’t be good at it/don’t have time for it/have more important things to do/think it would be irresponsible…do it anyway..

If only because your whole life can turn on a dime…