Live like you were dying
woo.
Hello!
Buckle up because it’s been a while, and I have lots to say. I hope you’re having a lovely start to summer season, that your air quality is manageable, that something made you smile today.
Three weeks ago, we got the news that the aunt of one of our best friends had a stroke. She was about to turn sixty, and the whole family was planning to fly in to surprise her for her birthday the following weekend. This aunt was at our wedding, housed and took care of Will for a couple months when he was in between leases in our early 20s, was the center of her family, had a husband, son, and a daughter. For a couple days after her stroke, the family was unsure if she was going to live, if her brain was functional enough to support her, what her life might look like even if it could.
For them, these must have been harrowing days. I know when my mom was sick, those days in between her starting hospice and her dying were so traumatic and complex. We didn’t know exactly when she would leave us. Should I go to the bathroom right now? Can I stay over at Will’s tonight? What do I do with my hands?
There are rarely any direct answers in life, but when you don’t know the answer to the biggest question in your universe, and the answer will change absolutely everything, it can feel unbearable. The purgatory of these days, the wanting them to end, the never wanting them to end, are actually a kind of hell, a pre-hell to the one that’s coming. They are also beautiful at times and surreal and clarifying, at least for me they were. But when we got the news of my friend’s aunt and I knew her family was going through some version of that pre-hell, my whole body went into freeze. I kept thinking about her daughter who she was so close with. Her sweet husband and loving son. Of those cruel, strange days of not knowing what will happen.
Because of how empathy works, whenever I thought about their family in the hospital, waiting for the doctor to deliver them some kind of fate, I felt as though I myself were going through those purgatorial days with my mom again. I laid on the couch in my home in Portland, thousands of miles away, feeling like I’d been hit by a truck, crying, no appetite, unable to really move my body. Of fight, flight, freeze, fawn, I am definitely a freezer with a fawn cusp/wing. (The new Love Language test—what’s your primary trauma response?) I was back with my mom about to take her last breath. She was about to be gone forever. My friend’s aunt died five days after her stroke.
I don’t mean to make this about me. This family’s loss is not about me, though I love them, and the pain I feel for them and my friend goes so bone-deep. But, in case this has happened to you too, I did want to write this out, to say that, on June 29, it will be twelve years since my mom died, and still, traumatic news can hijack me, can bring it all back, turn my body into the 22-year-old version of itself, holding her mom’s hand as she leaves her body.
Sometimes, I think there is something wrong with me that I can be so deeply, bodily affected by something this many years later, the echo of those events with my mom reverberating through my every cell. Like the circuitry in me is wired wrong. How have I not worked the trauma out of my system yet? Is it a personal failure on my part? Should I have written about it more? Less? Should I have tried to become a zoologist instead of an artist and not made my grief a cornerstone of my work? Why hasn’t the therapy kicked in all the way? Why hasn’t this thing been washed out of me yet? Why am I so ill-equipped to adapt? Why am I so weak?
I was taking a Kendall Toole Peloton ride with a Mental Health Awareness theme last month, and she was talking about trauma. She said that sometimes, when we’re back in a tough spot, we may think, “I thought I beat this level. I thought I got past this.” Which is exactly what I think sometimes. Haven’t I gotten myself upright again? Haven’t I been “really good” for months now? How is it possible I am being brought to my knees again? I thought I’d worked myself through this specific juncture of healing. And yet, I’ve found myself back here, curled up on the couch at 4 p.m., forcing myself to eat a salad out of a big glass bowl while watching Queer Eye and then getting up to make buttered noodles because why did I make a salad in the first place?
But what I also know, what Kendall was saying, is: trauma is not linear, it is a whirlpool. It loops around and comes back then turns over on itself, jackknifes into the bottom of the ocean, and bounces back up. My circuitry actually has changed. My nervous system, the neural pathways in my brain, have literally shaped themselves in response to what I went through with my mom. My body is not the same body. My heart is not the same heart. I get frustrated when my trauma responses kick in still, and I want to force them down. I want to be able to sit down and write every day and be happy and feel strong and well-adjusted. I want to be a calm, collected, confident chick. A cool cat and kitten. But that’s just…not how life works? Not how trauma manifests.
Twelve years in, and I’ve come to the realization that these responses may be a part of my life forever. I have changed so much since that first year without her. I have processed and healed some and accepted and questioned. I don’t cry every day anymore. There are whole days where I barely think of her. But her death flayed me, and some parts of me will always be raw. I’m coming to accept that these moments/seasons/situations/experiences where my body is brought back to freeze may happen in some capacity forever. And I can’t fight them. I have to allow them in.
Adjusting my expectations for what “healing” looks like for me has felt really useful. Instead of believing some day these responses will be eradicated from my life, that my empathy and past experiences as a Highly Sensitive Person (HSP) will calibrate themselves so as to be non-existent, I am trying instead to put my energy toward understanding how to best support myself when inevitably I am triggered into that state again.
I need to talk gently to myself. I need to try to move my body. To be okay not sticking to my writing schedule. To drink water. To reach out to my incredible friends and husband who understand what is happening to me and can walk next to me through it. To remember I won’t feel this exact way forever. To understand this isn’t a weakness on my part, but a kind of human power that at its bottom is about love and connection. To know that feeling perfect and great all the time isn’t the goal, but that learning how to work with whatever state I’m in a way that will make me feel the safest is. It’s so uncomfortable being in that state, and often, I just want it to go away. But I know by now the gulf between wanting something to be true and the actual truth can be vast, uncrossable. Better to take in the view from where I already am.
*
I was talking to a friend about what was happening to me in response to my friend’s aunt, and she shared with me something her therapist told her: “When you experience a trauma, a door appears in your life, and it will remain there forever. Sometimes the door is quiet, but other times, there is a knock, and you get called back.” A rattle, then peace, then a rattle once more.
*
Sometimes, I feel like I get emotional whiplash. A few days after my freeze experience, I had the opportunity to teach at a beautiful place on the Oregon coast, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology.
I taught travel writing for two days and hiked and explored. I never feel more full and grounded than when I’m teaching. Teaching last week brought me back into my body. It connected me to other humans. But it’s also really difficult to navigate such extremes within a week—to be laying on the couch unable to move to leading a classroom for twelve hours a few days later. Sometimes, I feel like I have no center when I can swing back and forth between such intense experiences on seemingly opposite ends of the spectrum. It makes me a little nervous that I don’t have an emotional truth north, a center I can fall back into. Then I saw this…
Andrea Gibson is an incredible slam poet who I read and follow. They were diagnosed with ovarian cancer a few years ago, went through treatment, and it returned, and it has recently returned again. Andrea is remarkable. (Here is one of my favorite poems of theirs. Also, this is a great conversation between Andrea, Glennon Doyle, and Abby Wambach on the podcast “We Can Do Hard Things.”)
Andrea posted this the other day, talking about their experience processing the recent news of their cancer returning, and suddenly it all made sense. My yo-yo didn’t feel like a yo-yo anymore, but a suture. A sensical, healing place to be actually?
Again: maybe “steady” shouldn't be the goal. But feeling safe wherever I am by accepting it and recognizing it has a place in my life, whatever it may be.
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Has this ever happened to you?: A loss or tragedy occurs, on a global or personal scale, and all you want to do is tell everyone you love how much you love them, cast off the daily mundanity of life and start living every day to its fullest, squeeze the pulp out of each minute of your one wild and precious life? Quit your job and spend all your time being with people who matter most to you because why the fuck am I making spreadsheets when I could die at any minute?
This happened to me after we got our friend’s aunt’s news. Will and I were in a coffee shop right afterward, and there was a woman there who had brought a blanket and folded it into a perfect square for her elderly dog to lay on. The care she put into making her dog comfortable caused me to weep. At another table, a group of six males, what seemed like three generations, talking in Polish, the little kids making airplanes out of their juice box straws. A young woman with a purse slung over her shoulder, clocking in at work, shouting to the kitchen to say hey to her friend. All the humanity surrounding me, and the news of what my friend’s family was about to go through—every cell in me turned to water. (Wait, are cells already made of water?) I felt so lucky to be alive. I felt so desperately sad knowing it is all going to end one day, for all of us.
*
I don’t think anyone has better captured this sentiment than national treasure Tim McGraw in his hit song, “Live Like You Were Dying.”
For a refresher, watch this:
(Please note: the too-long jeans! The floating iPads! The white shirt against a white background that makes Tim look like a floating head! The pleather cowboy hat! The weird clear plastic chair!)
(The “Woo” here absolutely cracks me up.)
I love country/pop country. I love it, I love it, I love it. It just makes me feel good. This song amps me up. But I also want to pick at it a little bit. That’s why you’re here, right?
It’s undeniable that the longer you live, the more you lose. An inviolable principle of life math. One of my life’s projects (perhaps all of ours, though I don’t want to speak for anyone) is to learn how to square the fact that we are all dying and that everyone we love is dying with having to clean the bathtub drain.
What does “living like we’re dying” actually mean in practice? We can’t go skydiving every day. We can’t all go Rocky Mountain climbin’ each weekend! We can’t spend every waking minute chipping away at our bucket list. We can’t actually act as though tomorrow will be our last day on earth because, in the event that it isn’t, we still need to live. We need to focus on that task too, on not dying, which means meal planning and going to work and getting the freaking trunk on the car fixed for the third time this year and ordering more sunscreen (so we don’t die) and weeding to appease the landlord and to avoid a fine and clipping our toenails and buying clothes for the baby who insists on growing and filling the dog’s water bowl and figuring out what to wear to the funeral and cleaning the cast iron skillet and trying to remember to take our vitamins at least five mornings a week.
If we can’t skydive every day to prove to ourselves we are living life to the fullest, if we can’t pause life to put all our energy toward not losing it, what does living like we’re dying actually look like?
So many times, the answer to this question seems to come in the form of generalities. Grab life by the horns. (?) LIVE LAUGH LOVE! Just do it already! Choose happiness. For as emotional of a person as I am, I can also be very practical when it comes down to the nitty gritty, and so this is where I always get snagged. I never feel satisfied with these platitudes, like most of us probably don’t. They sound good and inspirational, but What. Do. They. Mean? How do you make the slogan actionable? WHAT’S THE DELIVERABLE?! (Did I use that correctly?)
If I were actually going to live like I were dying, I would fly every single person I love to Portland, put them in a big house, and never let them leave. I would spend the rest of my days being with all the people who matter to me. We would eat macaroni and cheese and have dance parties and go hiking and sing and then we would all die at the same time so no one would have to be sad.
Of course this is impossible. I know this. So then what?
What I’ve come to, which I’m still workshopping, and which I’m sure I’ll consider to work over forever, is that paying attention and acting on what I learn from that deep attentiveness is the best way I know how to live like I’m dying. It is leaning toward instead of leaning away from. Listening instead of ignoring. Being curious instead of afraid or at least questioning the fear.
But here, with those statements, we run into this problem again of generalities.
On the surface, I know what it means to “pay attention.” We’re taught in preschool to sit with our legs crossed (criss-cross applesauce!), eyes ahead, hands in our lap. Focus. “Can I please have your undivided attention?” More life math. Long division and short. Don’t be poking your neighbor or picking your nose or staring out the window or tying your friend’s shoelaces together. Don’t be distracted from the present moment.
As an adult, sitting criss-cross applesauce on the alphabet rug looks something like not letting myself tune out. Means identifying the things that distract me from the actual work I need to be doing and then trying not to do them. Questioning the things that feel easier to move towards. I get real suspicious of easy these days.
If you’re paying true close attention to the world, you’re not going to feel good a lot of the time. Because you’re not numbing out the things that make you uncomfortable, that are really freaking hard to sit with. Job stress and money stress and climate fear and trauma and grief and everything else.
For a long time, the pain of grief caused me to tune out—to find techniques for numbing myself because to be in my body, to live without armor (armour hehe) in a world where my mom didn’t exist was too intense, too raw for my brain and body to handle. To take the edge of that pain, to dull its edges, I drank a lot more alcohol. I also ate more food, mostly egg salad. I screamed a lot. On a biological level, these defense mechanisms against pain and discomfort make complete sense. From alcohol and from sugary or fatty foods, our brain gets a quick-release chemical hit. From screaming, (mostly at Will), my body’s energy got released. For a brief moment, I was relieved of suffering. The unfortunate irony is that these Band Aid solutions to feeling okay actually work against the cause in the long term. The alcohol made me more depressed. The food made me tired and didn’t nourish me. Screaming at your boyfriend for months on end is never a good idea. All of these things disconnected me from myself and from the people I loved. There was no way I could show up the way I needed to, for anyone. At the time, that was sort of the point. I didn’t want to show up.
That’s changed. For me now, one way I’ve found to work against this tendency toward numbness or avoidance is to ask myself: What would be the easy way through this and what would be the hard way? For instance, it is really hard for me sometimes to sit down and write. (It was really hard for me to sit down and write this post and it took me three weeks.) It feels scary and like a lot of emotional and mental work, and at times, I dread it. So I ask myself, if that’s the hard way, what’s the easy way? The easy way is laying down on the couch and scrolling through Instagram. The easy way is walking the dog and cleaning the house and taking a really long shower. I know myself well enough now to know when I’m avoiding the hard thing, which is often the thing I really need to do for my well-being. I can also walk Mudbug and clean the house and take a glorious shower, but if I’ve done the hard thing first, I always feel infinitely better and those easy things become enjoyable and nurturing instead of avoidance tactics.
(Conversely, sometimes I really want to write and am excited about it and want to get into the weeds of my novel, but my body is telling me to rest. But I don’t want to rest! I want to work. It is harder for me, in that instance, to make myself rest than to work. But instead of forcing myself to sit down at the computer and power through, if I let myself take a little break, recharge, and then sit down to write, I will feel more at peace, the writing will be better, quicker, the work will be more enjoyable. I’m actually listening to myself, a body with physical needs. )
Maybe the hard thing for you is making a nerve-y phone call or starting a project or applying for a new job. Maybe it’s breaking up with someone or telling someone you love them for the first time or admitting you have a hoarding problem. It’s easier to not make the phone call. It’s easier to say you’ll just do it later. Of course it is. We are hardwired to take the path of least resistance. Taking the path of least resistance is a great way to conserve energy. It’s not so great if we’re trying to feel our most awake and alive and connected to ourselves and to other human beings. Try to pay attention to when you are avoiding something or have resistance toward it, and get curious about why. And then, if it feels safe, do it anyway. Dying isn’t easy. Living isn’t always either.
What I know, one thing my mom’s death has taught me, is that the small things are actually the big things. Not all of life can be a huge grand gesture. (Though if you’re open to me kidnapping you and keeping you in a house in Portland so we can hang out forever, let me know.) So focus on what’s doable amid all your responsibilities and full life. Don’t put off the conversation. Write the email, maybe even if you don’t send it. Find those five minutes to check in with someone even after a long day of work, maybe on the way to your car. Text your partner you love them on your lunch break. Take ten minutes to clean the kitchen if you know it makes your roommate happy. Text your college group chat to let them know they make your world go ‘round. Don’t hold something in until it’s too late. Be aware. Look up from your desk. Figure out what lights up the people around you and do more of it. Try to know yourself so that others can too. So that you can act on that self-knowledge in a way that brings them close. Show up for the people you love. That PowerPoint that’s so important? It can wait ten minutes for you to FaceTime with your dad. Schedule the monthly Zoom game nights. Start the book club. Get the ice cream. Don’t wait until next month, next year, if you don’t have to. We will fail at this constantly because of everything our daily lives throw at us. It is the trying that counts. The paying attention. The caring. Be a good listener. Send a letter just because. Remember birthdays or create a calendar system that doesn’t let you forget. Get real with yourself about what feels scary. Follow those impulses to say the thing that makes your heart race a little. I promise you you won’t regret it.
Only you’ll know what these things are for you. If your people are the most important thing to you, live your life like that’s true. Start now. I’m so terrified of looking up from my computer in twenty years and realizing I didn’t give myself to the world in the way I wanted to, in the way I knew I could. That’s part of why this emotional intensity I have freaks me out. If I spend so much time and energy on just trying to feel okay on a daily basis, what am I missing out on? But also, what other choice do I have?
I’m not trying to be a self-help/self-care guru person here. But, if like me, you are so aware of mortality on a daily basis and so full of love and a desire to show it and don’t know what to do with all of those feelings, I’m just throwing out some ideas. I’d love to hear yours.
Of the many things writing has taught me, reasonable goal setting is one of the best. You don’t necessarily have to turn your whole world upside down to do any of these things. Even just considering them is an incredible place to start. Ask yourself: what feels easy, what feels hard? Maybe you end up ignoring those feelings this time. Maybe you still pick the easy way more times than not. Maybe it’s just important to ask.
And if all else fails, you can always go Rocky Mountain climbin’. Ride a bull on the way. Watch an eagle as it is flying. I’ll meet you there.
Of course, Mary Oliver said it best. From her poem “Sometimes”:
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I’ll leave you with this. Aside from the door metaphor, another thing my friend pointed me toward during our conversation was The Five Buddhist Remembrances. They go like this:
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
The only thing in this world that we have power over is what we do in this moment. Our actions are what we got. Make yourself proud. Turn the world upside down with your love.
Have an incredible weekend.
I’ll always be rooting for you.
xo,
Maggie
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