Fleetingness Into Focus
In February of 2018, I experienced a grim reminder of the passage of time. It would be the first in a series of painful reminders that year.
Time marches on whether you like it or not, whether you are ready for it to keep on marching or not. Life is fleeting. Embracing the fleeting reality can be freeing. We only have a limited time on the planet, so live large, have fun, and enjoy the people you love. Savor the ride! That is the healthy and empowering reaction to our universal expiration date.
If you’re like me, though, ruminating about the ephemeral quality of life induces anxiety of epic proportions. I have an all-pervasive tendency to worry, paired with often debilitating perfectionism, and a fear of failure (and success, go figure), so the reality of time passing me by is not remotely comfortable, or freeing. Do you ever find yourself suddenly panicked at the thought of how much time has passed, and conversely, how little time you have left? I venture down this rabbit hole often in a fit of insomnia, usually in the dark, heightened by a crippling fear that I’m the only one on the planet whose mind is racing in circles at that exact moment. Cue the heart palpitations and shallow breathing of a panic attack, which makes the whole concept doubly prescient as I experience what are undoubtedly the throes of death. At the same time, my brain is berating me that this, THIS, is what I’m spending my last moments alive worrying about?! Thankfully, fits of terror have a time limit in human bodies, the physical part, at least, and I finally fall asleep from sheer exhaustion.
Taking comfort in the fact that the sun rises the next morning, I can tap into a hopeful optimism. Magical thinking about the future is my drug of choice. That I will get my shit together tomorrow and, once and for all, I will start to live out my potential to its fullest extent —that kind of magical thinking. Because, there’s always a tomorrow, right?
Wrong.
Nothing brought this more into focus than the decline and passing of a close friend from ovarian cancer in February of 2018. If you’ve ever sat alongside someone you love as they suffocate under the grasp of ovarian cancer, you know how cruel and hideous this disease is. My friend was diagnosed in May 2016, just SIX WEEKS after getting a squeaky clean bill of health in her annual well-woman visit. Our group of friends was out to brunch, and my friend complained that she had been feeling strangely bloated. My historically thin friend’s abdomen was distended, the evidence was plain to see. Rightly concerned, she went to the doctor a few days later. Her doctor was alarmed and ordered a litany of x-ray imaging and blood tests. A week later she was armed with a bunch of information about her feared diagnosis and made her way down to MD Anderson in Houston. Her ‘journey’— she’d hate that I used that word ('I’m not calling it a ‘fucking journey’)—lasted eighteen short months. She fought, clawed, and kicked her way through surgery, radiation, hair loss, many courses of chemo, blood clots, and neuropathy, until finally, she stopped treatment, her body and lungs drowning in fluid. She passed away two days later.
My friend was the type of person who didn’t just think about doing, she did. She indulged all her curiosities. Instead of wondering about what it would be like, she went out and experienced it. Wise beyond her 50 years, her life had more than its fair share of trauma. Her father was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Her younger sister passed away at a young age. The love of her life was an alcoholic, which ended their marriage but not their love. He died from his disease not long after they divorced. This was all unbeknownst to most of her Austin friends, myself included, until the day of her memorial. She hadn’t dwelt on her tragic memories. Perhaps, it’s that plethora of personal tragedy that propelled her to live fully because she knew what was at stake?
In her wisdom, my friend didn’t shy away from experiencing life whether or not she had someone to share it with. Alone or with friends, she enjoyed nice meals (out, she didn’t cook), volunteered for festivals, traveled, attended book readings, talks or art openings, every night of the week. This proclivity was often infuriating to the people who loved her and begged her to take care. For fuck's sake, she attended a Shawn Colvin concert instead of getting herself to the emergency room as her lungs filled with fluid! In true fashion, my friend believed it had been worth it. All but three weeks of her way-too-short fight, my friend spent it upright, doing the things that filled her up.
Losing someone is awful, full stop. I’ve lost a few people in my life, grandparents mainly. But, this loss of a contemporary was a different monster altogether. In the weeks following her death, as her friends struggled to come to terms with losing her, I tried to find pictures of us, evidence of our time together. I suppose it’s not surprising that pictures were hard to come by. My friend was too busy experiencing to archive every moment of her life. I managed to find one of us at the 2017 Women’s March in her chemo-hair glory, smiling from ear to ear. We ambled slowly that day, my friend wanted more than anything to march. I also found a beautiful quote on her Pinterest account by Margaret Atwood which read, “In the end, we all become stories.” But what she annotated below made me cry anew and brought everything into focus…
“May we live our lives, so we can rest in peace.”
The most fitting way for me to honor my friend is to embrace the fleetingness and live fully, present to the possibilities.
Thank you, my friend.
