When my phone’s second news alert about Kobe Bryant told me that his daughter was in the helicopter with him, it didn’t matter anymore that he was a celebrity athlete or whether I’d had mixed feelings about him. In that moment, the one truly important thing about him was that he was a dad, whose journey along that sacred road had just ended with the unimaginable.
Unimaginable, and yet many of our minds traveled instinctively to that awful space as soon as we understood what had happened. As parents, we know we’d make the ultimate sacrifice to save our children. We’ve actually thought about it in some detail, to try to be ready if the time ever comes. But what if the most you could give was not enough? The possibility that you can’t save your child from a tragedy is too terrible to acknowledge.
I know too much about what it means to face a parent’s worst fears.
In the days after I learned I had cancer this past fall, I had no idea how bad it was or wasn’t. So, being me, I set about preparing for the worst-case scenario. But in that context, preparation does not apply. The worst-case scenario is devastation of everything you’ve built for your family, and there is no recovery. You cannot make it be ok for your children to lose their mother just as they’re coming of age, just when they’re mature enough to comprehend the significance of the loss. What if, despite every hour of every year that I’ve tried to model strength for them, the memories of their mom that stick with them most vividly are my last days, in pain, trapped in a weak and failing body? What if, despite all the happiness I’ve tried to make possible for them since before I even met them, I turn out to be the person who hurts them most of all?
Contemplating that future was totally overwhelming, both physically and mentally. It still is. I can’t even speak out loud those words describing my fears. I’m functioning pretty well these days only because I — we — have been spared by modern medicine. For now.
For months after my diagnosis, I saw a blurry clock floating above the head of every person, following them everywhere, counting down to zero. The people in the elevator with me at work, going to give one more day to their jobs. My doctors and nurses. The other driver I accidentally cut off during a rainy commute. The servers, the cashiers. Tiny babies. My children’s teachers and coaches. My children. All of their numbers were censored, but I still felt them descending, hard and absolute.
The clocks made me sad, but at the same time I liked how they let me see people, and how they let me see myself relative to them. As ridiculous as it sounds for someone in her mid-30s, I’d never lost that young person’s mentality that makes you assume you’ll outlive everyone you meet. But now I discovered my subconscious instinct to undervalue other people’s lives — not a lot, but just enough to operate as if I’d be around longer than they would. It felt healthy to expel that from my worldview. It was a profound relief to understand that we all have in common the challenge of coming to terms, in our own way, with the paradoxes of this life: Miraculous and ordinary. Real and finite. Meaningful and forgettable. Everything and nothing.
Following Kobe’s death, a thoughtful person asked this:
Part of the “wisdom” death inspires is, I think, our liberation from a generalized need to hold each other accountable. That need is valid, but we’re often overzealous in pursuing it. The countdown clocks were a constant reminder to me that everyone’s time is coming, that everyone gets the death penalty, and that most of us will end up desperately wanting nothing but mercy. With this truth in my face all the time, I learned to practice compassion, which makes my days much more enjoyable. It’s a tragic lens, but also a magical one. The kind of magic that’s as real as anything else.
When I was still lost in the depths of uncertainty about my family’s fate, a friend suggested to me that, if you can manage to set aside fear when you’re confronted with a scary monster, you might look the monster in the face and see if it has something to teach you. Since I couldn’t escape from my torturous fears about hurting my children, I found this thought empowering. I started to look for wisdom.
In the meantime, the sun kept coming up, and I kept coming back to consciousness right along with it. I still felt physically healthy. My days kept marching along to their normal rhythm: alarm, coffee, dress, commute, work, exercise, dinner, collapse. Following that song beat by beat, I was mostly able to keep our family’s trains running on time as I usually do. As always, the rhythm pleaded for a melody, for harmonies. John and I improvised them measure by measure, and the kids sang along with us. Each day reminded me: You’re still here. You get to make at least a little more music. For yourself, for them.
The monster still terrifies me, but it has taught me this: the last note I play may be my very worst one. I don’t think it’s a sound I will want in my song. And by the time I realize I’m playing the coda, it will be too late to develop any more beautiful motifs that will stay in anyone’s ears. After the diagnosis is terminal, or as the helicopter is going down, or whatever, pain and fear may well dominate my experience. I will have run out of time and space to say goodbye to the people I love — including myself — the way I’d want to.
The way I want to say goodbye is possible only now, and in moments like now, when I’m healthy and reasonably content. It’s in my casual hugs and the times I laugh with you. It’s in every meal that brings my family to the table together. It’s in the songs I never quite master on the piano, and in those few occasions when my voice resonates. It’s in the times I dance joyfully and run as fast as I can. It’s in the way I want to know what happened in your life and how you felt about it. It’s how I’m never satisfied and how I keep asking, “what’s next?” It’s in my wish for everyone to find their way to redemption, however long the road is. It’s in the dreams I never stop chasing, and the ones I concoct for you. It’s in writing this down. This — this right now, until whenever my clock strikes zero — is my only opportunity to say goodbye the way I want to.
I still have enough time to make it beautiful. Hallelujah.