How to Live

We live how we die. We die how we live.

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We live two lives.

Our first life is a story. It is your autobiography. How you would sum your life up in words. Draw the dots into a line that makes sense. Your Wikipedia article.

Our second life is the one we live through our pores. The life we sweat through. Ooze blood and drop hot tears. This life you can’t show anyone else. Yet everyone knows because they too live this life.

She had a large mass on her left cheek. She couldn’t speak, but she didn’t need to. The room spoke. Her husband’s eyes spoke. His knitted eyebrows caressed withered eyes that seemed to glisten with dew. The hustle of the nurses spoke. The ward spoke. There was a peculiar feeling in ward 6B as if it was ready to start forgetting the patient who was scheduled for death.

There is a skill to living. The skill is to do things the process of which you can do with contentment and peaceful joy. The process of which that, if you were to die tomorrow, you wouldn’t spend your time in any other way. In this way, you dance towards death. Or, better put, you dance towards the end of what is known.

There is a way to die. It is in soft acceptance. She taught me that. I asked her what it was like to know. She looked at my, patted her chest where her heart still beat, and then looked and pointed up to the ceiling. She looked back at me and nodded.

“I’m happy.” She mumbled through her enlarged cheek.

It felt like she was ready to return. She didn’t look like she was dying. In her knowing gaze there was no life unlived.

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I don’t know if there is a best way to live. If there were, I have a feeling that it has to do with something about acceptance. Accepting things as they are, while still committing to live life to the fullest potential.

The second person I met who was scheduled to die had cancer in her ribs. She admitted that she watched garbage T.V. to take her mind off things. I wasn’t sure what the ‘things’ were but I imagine they somersaulted in a circus of panic, fear and pain. The surgeon had told her she had 3 months to live. That was 5 months ago.

She sort of had a ‘Fuck off’ attitude. I found it distasteful at first. But as we spoke for longer, I realised she was kind. In the context of dying, perhaps she had just ceased to give a fuck how she came across.

Our whole life we are implored to be kind to others. Kindness is a virtue. But so is authenticity. It is not true kindness if you are acting in opposition to how you feel or who you are to please others. Accept yourself and act accordingly even if it is at the expense being ‘nice’. Once you can accept yourself, including the muck, you can realise a kindness that is whole.

I asked her how she would have liked to have been told that she was dying. She said it was simple:

“He just needed four words. ‘I. Am. Sorry. To. Say’. That, and it would have been nice if he pretended to care!”

She hated the pain and she hated being in the facility to manage the pain. She said that she had had a good innings. If she weren’t strapped to this bed battling the pain, she would love to continue whatever she used to do. Going to the theatre. Being with friends. Cooking.

Most of our being is in transition. En route. Big transitions and small ones. Leaving something behind and moving towards something new. The transition from uncertainty to certainty. Even when we think we have arrived, in the next moment we are moving again on the escalator of time that crawls forward whether we like it or not.

I hope I can learn how to be in transition. To learn how to live. That blurry state of movement; catching ourselves in the midst of change so that when we meet an end or a beginning, we are already present in the change of things.