LIVE LIKE YOU WERE DYING
Published in For the Defense, the newsletter of the New Mexico Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, Winter 2010.
Life is Fragile
Many of us have been stunned with the recent loss of friends and colleagues. We mourn their passing and we mourn the tragic circumstances of family members, especially young children, left behind. I feel that when someone I love or know well dies, a piece of me dies with them.
I understand better, as I have aged, John Donne’s famous line: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”
The Probate
It was the most earth-shattering probate I ever handled. I almost didn’t recognize him when he came to my office. This was a colleague, another attorney whom I had known for over thirty years. Just a few months earlier he and his wife (I’ll call him Ed) were witnesses at the wedding I performed in a park for a common friend, a physician.
Our friend, the physician, died a couple of months after the wedding. Now here was Ed. He had suffered a stroke that made him almost unrecognizable to me—like he had aged twenty years in three months. And he was in my office asking me to do a probate for his wife, who though she looked the picture of health at the wedding, had just died.
Life is fragile. Handle with care. This is the message we have consistently received from books like Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture; Tim McGraw’s song, Live Like You Were Dying; and the movie The Bucket List, featuring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson.
But the focus on dying and death isn’t really about dying and death–it’s about living. Once we internalize our own mortality, what does it mean? What should we do with that realization?
Debate regarding the “good life” runs throughout the Great Books of civilization–without any uniformity among the great thinkers. I believe, however, that our common humanity simplifies the matter. For our purposes, the lyrics to Tim McGraw’s song, Live Like You Were Dying, make a good outline for examining our lives. I have organized these meditations around four lines from the song. When confronted with his mortality, the man Tim McGraw sang about made four important changes in the way he lived.
I loved deeper
The stories that touched me most intensely after 9-11 were the stories of husbands and wives, Moms and Dads, friends and lovers, whose last act before their impending death was to call the person they loved most deeply. Why is it that we wait until a crisis, or a loved one is on their death bed, before we reach out and express our most heartfelt feelings to those we love? The saddest stories I hear are the painful lament of those who never got to have those last words with a father, a mother, or some other loved one.
When I graduated from High School I wrote a letter to my Dad telling him how much I loved him and what I considered the blessing of his influence on my life. My Mother told me years later that he kept that letter in his wallet and he would oft times take it out, read it, and put it back in. My regret is that I never really expressed the depth of that feeling to him again until over twenty years later, when he was on his death bed.
How would you “love deeper” if you knew you had only thirty days to live? What would be the most radical expression of your love? Why wait?
I spoke sweeter
Words have enormous power—the power to build up or destroy; to change someone’s life. Our words touch eternity by the good or harm that they engender.
I feel compelled during these final years of my life to be an encourager. Discouragement lurks in all the nooks and crannies of each day, waiting to ambush all of us. I want to make life richer for others by encouraging them.
When my granddaughter brought her first picture to me, I complimented her and told her how creative she was. Truthfully, I made a shameless production out of it. And I repeated the show every time she brought me something new. Then I began to notice that she really was creative, far beyond her age level. Was she endowed with creativity or did I simply help cultivate it? What difference does it make?
Recently, she was with another friend and they were playing with Legos. My granddaughter suggested they make a horse and her friend said that she didn’t think she could make a horse because she wasn’t very creative. Then my granddaughter boasted, “Well, I’m very creative.” Will she discover a cure for cancer some day, or be president, or simply be a loving and affirming mother who encourages the next generation? Or all of the above! We touch eternity through sweet words spoken to others.
Who can you encourage today?
I gave forgiveness I’d been denying
We need to forgive for two reasons. First, unforgiveness is a chain that ties us to past pain and lets someone’s wrongful action continue to control us long after it should.
Forgiving someone who has wronged us does not condone their actions nor absolve them from the moral and legal responsibility for their wrongdoing. Forgiveness does free us from being their victim.
Forgiveness is a process. You cannot forgive a deep hurt by a simple act of the will. But forgiveness is an act of the will! We will never feel like forgiving. We forgive by an act of our will and when the pain returns we forgive again and again, until we are finally free.
Second, unforgiveness robs us of the benefits of close relationships with those we love and need. I am astounded by the people I have known who cut off relationships with a child because they didn’t approve of the child’s boyfriend, girlfriend, or lifestyle. The relationship is more important than the principle.
Who do you need to forgive?