“Do you guys ever think about dying?”
The record scratch that follows Margot-Robbie-as-Barbie in the Barbie movie is comical because it comes from stereotypical Barbie, yes, but also because the question would be just as awkward in most conversations, at least in the United States.
Have you ever tried to talk to someone about death? I mean, not when it was necessary, like at a funeral or at a funeral home. And not in a joking way. It seems like the two acceptable ways to talk about death in our culture are jokes and horror. Spooky season brings out all the skeletons and ghosts and haunted places and slasher films, all in good fun, but does it make anyone actually think about death?
Sorry. This is a bit heavy today. If you’re new here, I promise it’s not always this way. I have been thinking about death more since I survived a massive pulmonary embolism in May, and that brush with death was the catalyst for my 10 Things I Made Myself Do personal project. But I’m still mostly uncomfortable talking about or thinking about death.
Confession: I don’t have a will or any kind of written plan as to what I want done with my stuff or my people after I die. My family, both the one I was born into and the one I’ve co-created with my husband, are not terribly proactive about death.
Let’s read about that!
So when our book club decided to read The Measure by Nikki Erlick, I was hesitant. I mean, I’ll read just about anything, and I’m grateful for choices that push me out of my reading comfort zone. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to read a book that put death at the forefront of society.
If you’re not familiar with the gist of this book, as I was not, it goes like this: everyone in the world wakes up one day with a box on their doorstep. Inside the box is a string, the supposed measure of their life. As humanity tries to make sense of this global phenomenon, scientists and researchers are able to pinpoint the specific time associated with the length of a person’s string.
Some people opt to look at their strings. Some people don’t. Some people are forced to. Governments make different decisions about the strings. Policies are enacted. Support groups form. The strings create a massive shift in society. (To be honest, it reminded me of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.)
Ultimately, the book asks the kinds of questions I would rather avoid most of the time. Questions like: How will we choose to live when death is not only certain but specific? Will we treat people differently if their life spans are significantly shorter? Would we choose to live differently if ours was the short string?
These are the kinds of questions I’ve been wrestling with since May. I remember a time in my 20s when I was sure I wasn’t going to live past 30. I had no concrete reason to believe this. I was scared of what I’d be missing if I did. Then life got full and busy with a husband and kids and while I sometimes worried about what could happen to them, I rarely let myself think about my own mortality. Until the last few years, I haven’t had to think about people close to me dying hardly at all. I had all four grandparents alive until my senior year of college when my first grandfather died. Then my other grandfather died in 2016. A grandmother followed in 2021. Then Phil’s dad in 2022.
The older I get, the less luxury I will have to not think about death, but it’s still other people’s deaths I’m thinking of, not my own. At least not until this past May.
I don’t know how close I actually came to dying five months ago, and I don’t want to dwell on that part of it. It happened. I lived. I’m healing. Could it have gone differently? Yep. But it didn’t, and I’m still here.
But it reminded me that I won’t always be here, and I don’t know how long I have. I can’t outrun death. I can’t outthink it. I can’t deny it.
So, what will I do with my time, my life until then?
While reading The Measure, I was slightly depressed for about half of the book. And then the tone shifted, and it ends on a hopeful note, which is how I want to live my life in the face of death.
This quote from the book sums it up for me:
“The beginning and the end may have been chosen for us, the string already spun, but the middle had always been left undetermined, to be woven and shaped by us.” - Nikki Erlick, The Measure
That’s what I’m doing now—weaving and shaping the kind of life I want to live right here in the middle of it all.
First of all, I somehow missed everything about your health scare! I'm so glad to hear you're well on the way to recovery!
And what a coincidence that just this morning I posted about the last conversation with my wife's grandfather. People do hesitate to talk about death, but if we can find redemptive and creative ways to do so, it seems to make it a little easier to "stare at the sun," as Irvin Yalom says. Thanks for sharing this book, it's on the stack!