“Life is long if you know how to use it.” SENECA, On the Shortness of Life
My sister-in-law’s father was dying on August 7th, and the one thing keeping him in that room was his mother. She was traveling in from another town. He held on until she arrived, said goodbye to her, and a few hours later he was gone.
I want you to notice exactly what he waited for, because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. Not a better prognosis. Not more treatment, more tests, more time in the vague sense we usually mean when we say we want more time. One person. One moment. When he had it, it was enough, and he let go.
Here is what that taught me, plainly, without dressing it up: most of us are waiting for the wrong thing. We tell ourselves we’re waiting for time, more of it, later, once things settle. He wasn’t waiting for later. He was waiting for one specific, real thing happening right now, and the moment it arrived, he received it completely. That is the entire difference between the way he spent his last hours and the way most of us spend an ordinary Tuesday.
Viktor Frankl saw a version of this in the camps. Prisoners who couldn’t let themselves actually live inside the day they were in, because that day only counted as a placeholder for the day the war ended and real life resumed. He called it provisional existence, and he watched it wear people down faster than the hunger did. The ones who held up best weren’t the ones with the rosiest predictions about the future. They were the ones who found something real to hold onto inside the actual day in front of them, someone to love, some small task that mattered, instead of postponing themselves until conditions improved.
I don’t think you need a camp for this to apply to you. I don’t think I’m exempt either. So let me ask you directly, the way I asked myself this week: what are you postponing right now, waiting for some future condition to be met first? The trip you keep pushing to next year. The conversation with your father, your mother, your kid, that you keep telling yourself you’ll have once work calms down. The version of your health you’re going to start taking seriously once this project ships. I’ll tell you plainly what I told myself: work calming down is not a real date on a calendar. It’s a story we tell ourselves so we don’t have to be present today. Pick one thing off that list right now. Not next month. Today. Call them, or say it, or go.
Here’s mine, plainly, because a lesson like this means nothing if I only aim it at you. I’ve spent a long time treating the harder things, not errands, reckonings, the conversations and decisions and feelings I keep meaning to actually work through, as things I’d get to eventually, once I had more time, once the moment felt right. It never does. What I’m changing isn’t a schedule. It’s the excuse. The things I’ve been postponing don’t need a better moment from me. They need me to stop waiting for one.
He didn’t get a better outcome. He got the one that actually mattered to him, because he refused to leave before it arrived. I don’t know a better definition of a life spent well than that, and I would rather learn it from him now than learn it too late myself.
To my sister-in-law and her family: I’m sorry for your loss, and I’m grateful, in the strange way grief lets you be grateful for things, that he got the goodbye he was holding on for.
