Knowing What Matters

What would you do if you found out you had one year to live? It’s an old question, one we’ve each heard countless times. Most recently I heard it voiced by a wise twenty-something. (Am I the only one who regularly is taken aback by the young sages among us?)

For the tenth or eleventh year, my daughter Kay* is working on a novel as part of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). The NaNoWriMo website describes itself as “a fun, seat-of-your-pants approach to creative writing.” Kay has been a storyteller since she could talk. She began to believe in the possibility of a career in writing fiction when her eighth-grade English teacher said she believed Kay could make a living at it. (Never dismiss the influence you can have in someone else’s life!) Some of Kay’s NaNoWriMo months have been spent reworking earlier drafts but, yes, she really has quite a collection of novels that she continues to polish.

Last week, one of her characters was reflecting on her life. Like Kay, Cassidy refuses to fool herself about the amount of time she might have remaining. Even with decades of living likely to be in front of her, she evaluates her life rationally, the number of years she can expect to live, all that she hopes to accomplish before she dies. For reasons I will not go into (it’s not my story) some of those closest to her have not considered or do not need to consider the existential questions which Cassidy asks herself.

Having recorded this character’s deliberations only the night before, the topic was on Kay’s own mind when we got together for our evening phone chat. After talking about what had happened to each of us during the day, a headache that was relieved through attention to pressure points on the bottoms of my feet, a car that she had taken into the shop for repairs, she told me that she had been thinking about the question “If I found out I would live only one year…” After speaking her own truth on the subject, she invited me – if I chose – to share my own. Kay has shared the gift of her being with the people around her for twenty-six years but she has not yet shared her gift of storytelling except in classes or with those of us closest to her. She still has stories to write, polish, and publish. I am in my seventh decade and while I love life, I find that I have very little I would need to do. I’m aware that this response reflects the grief I’m experiencing these days. I suspect that it's also simply another facet of aging.

After Kay and I expressed ourselves on the topic as well as we could in that moment, I gently reminded us both that this question is significant precisely because it encourages us to take that hard look at how we’re living our lives right now. While a person might be enjoying how they spend their days, would they continue to be satisfied if they learned that they had only one year to live? Five years? Five weeks? Holding that idea lightly, we might ask ourselves if there is something else calling to us that we could be working toward. What is begging to be accomplished or celebrated? Who are we being called to love? 

What do we notice when we make room for questions like these?

Two years ago, I joined Kay and countless others in writing daily during November as part of NaNoWriMo. Wanting to process a knot of relationships which had emerged during my three years in Wausau I wrote a memoir. This writing was also another way for me to shut out for a few hours at a time the inaudible cries of the world during that first Covid-19 autumn. This month, I am writing and except for the fact that I sit at my laptop four hours each day, I find it satisfying. In recent months (years?) I have felt that there is a writing project awaiting me yet what thread I am to follow has eluded me. My hope is that in writing about a variety of topics, I will discover a theme that I’m drawn to follow. I’m still trying to find ways to work on a project and also accomplish needful things… I also want to be open for whatever that quiet inner voice might suggest.

*not her real name