Photo by Rosalynn Carlson LaChapelle
A friend asked me recently what I would do if I learned I had one year to live. The unspoken assumption was that I would have all of one full year. However, if this imaginary scenario was anything like real life, the curtain could close at any given moment during the 365 days I had been granted. So I quickly thought of the question as being less hypothetical than actual.
When I was a child or an adolescent, I would probably have responded by listing people to see, places to go and things to do in the limited amount of time being offered. But this would have been just a game to play on a summer afternoon while waiting for the rain to stop. I knew elderly family members who had died and I had watched WWII documentaries on Walter Cronkite’s “The Twentieth Century.” I knew death was a reality, it’s just that it didn’t apply to me. I always assumed that tomorrow would arrive right on time next morning, just one more sunrise in the limitless amount of time stretching ahead of me.
Now my eighth decade is well underway, and I have come to see in a more personal way that all of us, including me, have a finite amount of time. When I was in Sunday School at Community Baptist Church, I remember listening to Reverend Elsesser as he read from the book of Isaiah: “All flesh is like grass, and all its glory like the flowers of the field.” Back then, I thought that was a strange thing to say since everyone knew people live longer than grass and flowers. I get it now.
But if it weren’t a game and I actually had just one year to live, I might want to go on another cruise, maybe to Alaska this time or down the Mississippi River. Or maybe I would go back to Washington DC and see some of the sights I haven’t seen yet. Renting an RV and traveling around the country for a few months sounds cool too. Maybe I would go with Finley, Everly and Emma to Disney World although I doubt I would like amusement parks anymore in my hypothetical life than I do in my actual one.
It just might be that I would also spend as much of my hypothetical final year in pretty much the same way I hope to spend whatever actual time I have left. I would get my children’s book, Under the Stars, published. I would continue to go to the Quaker Meeting and be the secretary for Westerly Area Peace and Justice and Westerly-Pawcatuck Clergy Association. I would continue to read my books and write my short stories and blog entries. I’d still go to the YMCA to lift weights and go for run/walks around Wilcox Park and Watch Hill. I’d still go to family get-togethers and parties, see my friends, watch the Patriots, go the Rhode Island shore. I’d train to run the Manchester Road Race on Thanksgiving Day. It appears this hypothetical life and my actual life aren’t all that different in some important ways. All in all, I’d say that’s a good thing.
David James Madden