Every Day is a Gift
Sounds trite, right? Like something you would expect to see on a Hallmark card. Ordinarily, I might agree with you. Not after yesterday. Not anymore.
Yesterday, I learned that a nurse who I first met over a decade ago, and who has more recently helped administer my ketamine treatments, died. We sometimes joked about the fact that she and I were born a year and a day apart (and whose “vintage” was better!).
There is nothing I could say that isn’t positive – glowing, really – about her. She always had a smile at the ready, a hug if you needed one, and something kind to say. I wish I had said something to her, something to let her know how much her care meant to me.
Back to “every day is a gift”: what I would give for another day with her. Another day to bask in the sunshine that was her personality. Another day to experience her infectious bubbliness and laughter. And this, this, has made me reevaluate my opinion of the oft-used phrase. She was a rare human, indeed, who could reach me on the darkest of days without making me feel like a burden.
I think her death hits me especially because of our closeness in age – I am at the age where life is no longer a given, where people are starting to die. Thankfully not many, but I think I am beginning, along with my contemporaries, to realize that we are no longer ascending the teeter-totter of life, but are starting to slide down the backside.
And herein lies the Beast-in-waiting. So much of my life has been spent divining my own demise that the fact that my life is most definitely more than half over comes with an unexpected (and in some ways welcome, given thanks to the normalcy of the ever-present Beast) jolt.
To feel afraid of death is something I never, ever thought I’d experience. And now I am angry: why in God’s name have I wasted so much time being suicidal? And why can’t I turn it off, even now, when I am oddly – and newly – afraid of death?
Such is the conundrum that is my life now: to die by my own hand or to die when it is my time? It’s “funny”: I never thought I’d live to be 30, so much so that I was completely blindsided when I woke up on my 30thbirthday. I don’t know if I thought I was going to spontaneously combust when I went to bed at 29, but I sure as hell didn't know what to think when I woke up very much alive. That was the third time I cheated death, the first two being my two suicide attempts in my mid to late twenties.
The irony is that the nurse who just died was one of those people who are so full of life, full of energy, full of light. How is it fair that she – she who had so much zest for life – died so young, while I have spent so much of my life wishing I'd die, and I’m very much alive? She had two young adult daughters, a husband. Sometimes the unfairness of the universe is profound.
PS: I learned yesterday that my favorite high school teacher, my favorite teacher of all time, really, passed away. I took French from him my freshman and sophomore years. Yes, he taught me French, but he taught me so much more – he instilled in me a love of learning, something you really can’t teach, something for which I am forever grateful.
I am just reeling from these two deaths, two people who made the world a better, brighter place. I should note something here: I had planned on writing my high school teacher a note telling him the impact he had on my life. I always thought I had more time. Please, if you have someone who impacted your life, send that letter NOW – you may not have another chance. And while that's not the case here, it’s entirely possible that your note could bring someone back from the edge, giving them a new lease on life. You just never know.
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