Living Well

Dearest Friend,

A little confession? I’m tired of waking each morning thinking about my own death. It feels self-obsessive. Shameful,  and I don’t like myself for it. I am not telling you this because I want you to tell me it’s okay to obsess a little. I’m telling you this because I am weary of the obsession. So weary. 

Almost every morning, within a few minutes of finding my place in time, some part of me slides a question under my pillow about whether or not I am dying a good death, and I can’t let it sit there. I try, but I cannot.

Do you know what it’s like when you're in a meeting and your watch buzzes and no matter how determined you are determined to be, you simply cannot avoid making eye contact with it? No matter how hard you resist, you simply cannot resist checking out of the meeting mentally to see if your friends are planning to go to The National concert and whether your friend, Stephen, needs an immediate yes and if you don’t respond you won’t get a ticket and your friends will go without you and will probably talk about you on the way there and decide how you’re unwilling to prioritize time with them and will, understandably, decide to move on without you and your life will completely unravel until all that’s left is a knotty, frayed mess of string because you didn’t manage it just right by responding to that one text at that one moment?

I know what it’s like.  I know what it’s like every morning.

There is a part of me, one I have introduced to you and one that I love and I am not so ashamed of; the part  that is more like a thirteen-month old goldendoodle and all she wants to do is go walking, and now. Wants to go out and find woodpeckers and find shapes in the clouds and to pee in the woods and to wonder at the way the cold air feels on her newly shaven body. (Did I mention that we just got a thirteen-month old goldendoodle and that she is delightful? We did, and she is.) 

But there is also this part of me, a part that is in perpetual conflict with my inner goldendoodle; a part who wants to manage (a nice, soft way of saying “control”)  the process of my own dying. To get it right. The truth is, I am not afraid of dying. But I am deeply fearful of the fallout. Fearful that I won’t die a good death, and that if I do not, people will judge me inadequate and turn their backs on me, but not only me, but on the people I love. That my people will not be safe and will not be secure and it will be my fault and then what?  I  want to back away from these statements. But I cannot honestly do so. I don’t know for sure where this part comes from. Maybe John Prine was right. Maybe it’s just somethin' I picked up as a kid.

(By the way: Please, please, please listen to the whole song. Please - and maybe, if you’re really adventurous, the whole album.)

Or maybe not. Maybe the idea of the good death is baked into our culture. The idea that we have an obligation, a duty, to strive to get it, and I mean all-of-it, right all the way to and through the very end of our very bodily existence. And if we fail to meet that obligation, well - somebody has to pay the price for that failure, and if not us, then it falls to our heirs. What a fearful thought!  

Maybe these messages are everywhere. I mean, aren’t they? 

(For a slightly deeper dive into this topic, take a look here.)

Sure, we may have an idea of what a good death might look like, and I am not pushing back on that. But maybe it’s not what we think it is, and where is the evidence to support the notion that if I don’t get it right, my loved ones or I will pay the price? Of course, there is none. Zero. Not even one jot or tittle of evidence to suggest that I am being held to some standard for dying well by God, by the universe, or by the people around me. 

The vast majority of our people have been kind and spectacularly loving to both me and Kathryn. I had lunch with a friend today who suggested that the truest definition of  love is to see another through God’s eyes. Not as absolutely perfect, but as absolutely beloved even, and perhaps especially, in their imperfection. The context was completely different, but it seems to fit here, nonetheless. 

I have never felt the love of God more fully and unconditionally than I have these past three months, whether from the people around me or in the way the sunlight wanders through the trees in the early mornings or in the birdsong or in the warmth of a fire or in a sip of tea. 

Would I dare to suppose this is a reward for how well I am moving through the dying process?

Even typing such a sentence feels absurd and betrays a breathtaking level of hubris. A breathtaking level of I can do this alone. A breathtaking level of I don’t need you. A breathtaking rejection of the grace that is being offered to us in everything, in every thing, and a breathtaking belief that I can get it right, all by myself, thank you very much.

Jesus said:

“This is my commandment, that you shape up and get it right. That you do some hard self reflection and heal yourself, friend.  And if you do, then you win. And if you do not? Well, then try harder until you do. Because there is no second place here.” 

No. Jesus did not say that. Not ever. Jesus said:

“This is my commandment, love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” 

And then he went and did it. Talked the talk. Walked the walk.

Maybe that’s what it means to live well. Simply to follow in those footsteps. To lay down our lives for our friends. Cradle to grave. Not for the reward. But because that’s what it means to live well. Full stop.

I am pretty confident that early tomorrow, a little before sunrise, that part that wants to manage everything will stir and will slip one of those questions under my pillow. I am hopeful that maybe, just maybe, I might finally sleep through it, and be woken instead by a slobbery, licky goldendoodle, ready to go out and feel all the love being offered freely and to reflect all the glory of love right back into the world. Fearlessly. To float in gentle river of grace instead of striving, striving, striving to swim upstream toward something which cannot be earned at all or ever.

Oremus,

Chris

---

You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.

― Mary Oliver