Staring at the Sun

Have you ever received that phone call?

The one to tell you the world has ended?

The kind that hits you like a vicious kick in the stomach, leaving you unable to breathe, unable to move, unable to form a thought?

Someone has gone, someone who held up a part of your world, and now you can feel cracks spreading as the sky threatens to fall in.

One day, that phone call will be made for you.

There will be a slightly crumpled white funeral booklet bearing your name in flowing script, your face peering out of cabinets and pressed against piles of papers in that drawer where all the important stuff gets shoved.

Generally speaking, the human brain doesn’t comprehend this well. There are exceptions – anybody who has ever been severely depressed, for example, will know what it is to deeply consider the end – where suffering may cease, but so too will all other possibilities.

For many of us, however, thinking about our mortality feels like what psychotherapist Irvin Yalom called ‘staring at the sun’. Painful, dangerous, terrifying and possible only in brief flashes. Despite this, he urged us to imagine the spectre of death as a constant companion, a reminder to live well. Like a sort of morbid parrot sitting on your shoulder … “AWK! Polly gonna DIIIIIE!!!!!”

… I can’t think about it too seriously for long either, as you can see.

When I was working in residential treatment with people recovering from drug addiction, one of the things I used to hear that disturbed me most (and I heard a fair few things) was a common refrain amongst the youngest residents. They would say, often before deciding to leave treatment, “I’m too young to do this. I’ve got the whole of my life ahead. I’ll come back later when I’m ready.” As they walked out the doors, I knew there might never be a later. Overdoses, gangs and guns, drug deals gone wrong, the hard reality of life on the streets… alternatively, their ‘later’ might come after 5, 10, 30 years in the hell of addiction.

Always, we run out of time. We think we’ll figure it out one day, learn to do the thing we want, reconnect with that person we fell out with. On one level, we cognitively know this isn’t true, but we don’t ever really believe it.

A few weeks ago, I went to a funeral. A sad celebration of a truly unique little spark of life. I wondered how many of us standing there saying our farewells would have said and done things differently had we known how little time we would have with her. I wondered too how her life might have been different as a result. She was fearless, and funny, and quirky and a million other adjectives that don’t even come close to describing what was lost with her. This isn’t how it was damn well supposed to end.

Except that often it is. Life isn’t a movie with a coherent end. Things are left hanging, cut short and unfinished. Sometimes none of it makes sense, at all. We know this, in the rational part of our minds. Yet we can’t fully comprehend it, because we can’t fully comprehend the finitude of life. So we forget, and live as though there are no limits on our time. Our sneaky little brains lie to us. They have to in order to keep us reasonably sane, but still.

You can’t escape the end. Neither can I. Neither can anyone. But if you want to use the time given to you as best you can, it’s important to outsmart your grey matter. Look into the sun a little. Remind yourself each day that you have limited time, in a POSITIVE way that works well for you (it’s about noticing the rays, not frying your eyeballs). Pop a note on the mirror, or a card in your purse. Write down something each day you’ve been meaning to do but putting off. It might be as simple as ‘call someone and tell them I love them’, as practical as ‘book a diving lesson’, or as big as ‘talk to my husband about going to couples counselling’. There’s even WeCroak, an app that sends you a daily ‘death reminder’ (efficient, if a little morbid for my tastes).

It’s powerfully frightening, thinking about the end of our lives. But choosing what to do with the time we do have can empower us in the most meaningful of ways.

If one of the things you need to do to live well involves therapeutic work, make that appointment now. There’s always another tomorrow, another next week, another ‘one day’, until there isn’t.

Always, we run out of time.