Live Like You’re Going to Die (Because You Are)
On Friday, March 11, 2011, I picked up my mom at her house and we drove to the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in downtown Oakland for the second time that week. The previous Friday, my mom had called me early in the morning to say she’d had a rough night of sleep because her back was really bothering her. I encouraged her to go get it checked out, and she’d gone in for an exam and an X-ray. The X-ray showed a spot on her lung, so they asked her to come back the following Monday for a CT scan. This Friday appointment was to follow up and get the results from the scan.
My mom, my sister Lori, and I had spent a lot of time together at Kaiser over the past year, as my mom had been diagnosed with early stage breast cancer the previous spring. She’d had two surgeries as well as radiation treatment that she’d just recently completed. The surgeries and treatment had been successful, and my mom was declared cancer-free. Her breast cancer ordeal had been quite scary and stressful for everyone. The doctor we were scheduled to meet with that Friday was the same oncologist she’d been seeing for the past year.
He walked into the room with an intensely somber look on his face and didn’t make eye contact with us (although that was pretty normal for him). After a moment, he sat down and then said, “I’m sorry, Lois. I have some very bad news. Your CT scan has confirmed what we feared when we saw your X-ray. You have stage four lung cancer.” The blood in my body turned ice-cold. I looked at my mom. I could see the terror and disbelief on her face. I moved across the room to where she was sitting and grabbed her hand. Neither of us said anything, nor did the doctor. The three of us just sat there in silence as his words hung in the air. I finally was able to utter, “What does this mean exactly?” He said, “Well, as you know, stage four is the most advanced. It looks as though the disease has spread significantly and aggressively. Unfortunately, there aren’t many medical options. We won’t be able to operate. You can choose to pursue treatment options like chemotherapy and radiation, but with your advanced disease, we’re not sure if the benefits of that outweigh the costs. That’s a choice you’ll have to make in the coming days; it really comes down to a quality-of-life issue.” After another long pause, my mom asked, in a bit of a hushed tone, “How much time do you think I have?”
“Well,” he said, “based on the advanced nature of your disease, it’s hard to say for sure. On average with stage four lung cancer, we’re looking at a year, possibly less.” There really wasn’t much else to say or ask at that point. After another long and intense period of silence, the doctor got up, shook my hand, patted my mom on the shoulder, and said, “I’m very sorry, Lois.” I think he said a few other things after that—instructions about the next appointment or something. Quite frankly, I really don’t remember; it was all a bit of a blur. When he walked out of the room, however, my mom collapsed into my arms, sobbing. While I’d seen my mother cry a number of times throughout my life, although it wasn’t common, this, of course, was still like nothing I’d ever experienced. Not even her breast cancer diagnosis brought on this kind of emotion. This diagnosis felt different and final; she’d just been told she was going to die.
A few weeks later as the reality of the situation had set in and my mom began to get quite sick, I was on a run one morning and thought, I wonder what it’s like to be my mom right now, knowing she’s going to die. As soon as I had that thought, I literally stopped running and then thought, Wait a minute, I know I’m going to die, too—I just don’t know when.
As simple as this thought was, it was profound for me. I don’t live my life all that consciously aware of my own death—even though I know it’s inevitable. My own fears about death—my own and the deaths of people close to me—often force me to avoid thinking about it altogether. I do catch myself worrying about dying, sometimes more often than I’d like to admit, especially with our girls being as young as they are and given how many people close to me have died in the past decade or so.
I also hesitate to talk about death because it seems like such a morbid topic, a real downer. I worry that it’s too intense to address, or I superstitiously fear that if I focus on death I will somehow attract it to me or to those around me.
As a culture, we don’t really talk about death or deal with it in a meaningful way since it can be quite scary, emotional, and painful. Death also seems like the exact opposite of so much of what we do obsess about—youth, productivity, vitality, results, beauty, improvement, the future, and so on.
But what if we embraced death, talked about it more, and shared our own thoughts, feelings, and questions about it? While for some of us this may seem uncomfortable, undesirable, or even a little weird, think how liberating it would be to face the reality of death directly.
Steve Jobs gave a powerful and famous commencement speech at Stanford’s graduation in 2005 entitled “How to Live Before You Die.” In that speech, which now has even more poignancy given that he has passed away, Steve said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”
Contemplating death in a conscious way doesn’t have to freak us out. Knowing that our human experience is limited and that at some mysterious point in the future our physical body will die is both sobering and liberating.
The reason I’ve always appreciated memorial services—even when I’ve been in deep pain and grief over the death of someone close to me—is because there is a powerful consciousness that often surrounds death. When someone passes away, we feel more like we have permission to get real and be vulnerable, so we can focus on what’s most important (not the ego-based fear, comparison, and self-criticism that often run our lives).
What if we tapped into this empowering awareness all the time—not just because someone close to us dies or because we have our own near-death experience? What if we instead choose to affirm life and appreciate the blessings, gifts, and opportunities that it provides? As I heard in a great workshop I took years ago, “Most of you are trying to survive life; you have to remember that no one ever has.”
My mom’s illness and her death, just three months after diagnosis, were painful but powerful reminders of the precious and temporary nature of human life. There are reminders of this everywhere; we just often choose to avoid them, deny them, or worry about them—instead of embracing them.
I decided to end the book with this chapter on living like you’re going to die for a few reasons. First of all, it brings things back full circle to the first chapter, “Focus on What Truly Matters,” in which I talked about both the pain and the beauty of my mom’s death, and all that I learned from her as she was dying. Second of all, the awareness and perspective we often gain in the face of death is directly related to the core themes of this book—go for it, be yourself, accept who you are, be gentle with yourself, have the courage to be vulnerable, love yourself, remember that you are the source of your own happiness, and practice completely embracing and surrendering to the present moment.
Living like we’re going to die is actually about remembering to fully engage in life right now, to be grateful for the precious gift that it is, and to take back our power from anywhere and everywhere we give it away. We’re much stronger, more beautiful, more powerful, and more capable than we often give ourselves credit for. As we continue to catch ourselves—with empathy—when we stray off course, discount ourselves, and focus on things that don’t really matter, we can bring ourselves back to the truth of who we are. We can remind ourselves that we’re magnificent, valuable, and lovable just the way we are.
Thank you for taking this journey with me. I feel honored, humbled, and grateful to have been able to connect with you this way, and I hope you found this book useful.
If you’d like to connect with me personally, get more information about my work, attend one of my events, bring me in to speak to your group, and/or utilize the resources on my website, feel free to visit www.Mike-Robbins.com.
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