On the afternoon of Saturday, April 21, 2001, while hanging out at the bookstore
of the San Damiano Retreat Center in
Danville, I came across Wayne Muller’s How,
Then, Shall We Live?: Four Simple Questions That Reveal the Beauty and Meaning
of Our Lives. For whatever reason, one question stood above the others,
riveting my attention for the rest of my day-long retreat. That question was
How shall I live, knowing I will die? The other three questions (Who
am I? What do I love? What is my gift to the family on the earth?) are undoubtedly
significant and weighty ones — but they just didn’t speak immediately to my
situation. I suppose that I wasn’t surprised by those questions whereas I had
honestly never seriously asked myself How shall I live, knowing I will die?
Always a sucker for a good question, especially a profound and new one, I formulated
a methodology for tackling How shall I live, knowing I will die? To
make the question more concrete — and therefore more susceptible to my type
of analysis — I supposed that I knew exactly how much time I had to live and
asked how would I then live the rest of those days. I tried to be more specific
and made that time period one of the following: a day, a week, a month, 6 months,
a year, two years, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 30 years, 70 years. To help
me think about what I was going to do given that I was going to live another
day or another 20 years, I turned to the list
of life roles I was carrying around in my head as a way of partitioning
my life at any given time.
I thus converted the question How shall I live, knowing I will die?
to a series of questions of the form "If I knew I had only X (time period)
left, what would I do in life role Y?" Some examples were: "If I knew
I had only a week left to live, what I would do as a son?" and "If
I knew I had only two more years to live, what I would do as a board member
of Westminster House?" I organized my questions into a two dimensional
matrix (with time-to-death on one axis and my life roles on the other)– a spreadsheet
that I fondly called a "death action matrix".
The answers I came up with that day were dramatic, deep, and revealing — and
flowed directly out of the breakdown of the question. The prospect of death
— even hypothetical death — turns out to be acidly clarifying. If I have little
time left to live, most of what preoccupies me and seems so important would
instantly be reduced to nothingness. I loveed my work profoundly, but when I
asked myself the question "if I have a week to live, what would I do with
my job?", I answered without hesitation that I wouldn’t be spending any
time on my favorite project. I would, however, want to say good-bye to my co-workers.
Since I was quickly axing various roles I played for cases of a short life expectancy
(it’s easy to quit my beloved committees when I think I’m going to die in a
month!), I was intrigued by the question "how much time do I assume to
have in this life (implicitly, most likely) to make a certain activity "worth
my time"? For example, how many years would I want to have left for me
to consider getting married or having children? If I knew that death was impending
for me, would I stop blogging?
As I looked at the answers on my death action matrix spreadsheet, a central
theme emerged — the most important thing in my life, in the face of death,
was being at peace with the prospect of meeting my God, Judge, and Maker —
and letting my family and close friends know how much I loved them. I would
add today that I also want to know how much I was loved. The question that raised
by my matrix were "Do those close to me know how much I love them? And
how do I let them know?"
In spite of the insights that came forth that day, I was too easily sidetracked
by the realization that the central assumption of my exercise was merely hypothetical.
Most of use do not know the exact day we will die. Furthermore, death is usually
not like getting on a plane at a pre-assigned time, leaving us active to the
very moment of departure. I kept pondering how I could sustain a life lived
a daily intensity that I imagined that imminent death would prompt. Funny, how
I don’t wonder about that point any more.
Given my own analysis, I continued to wonder a lot about how others would answer
the question How shall I live, knowing I will die? On that grim morning
of September 11 — five months later — I got a partial answer when I learned
about the many last-minute love-filled emails or phone calls to husbands, wives,
children, friends, or mothers that poured forth from those who knew they were
at their end. Few of those who died that day would have parsed the question
of how to live into a two-dimensional matrix, but it seems that nearly all of
us need to love and be loved as we confront our own death.