Death is a funny thing—not ha-ha funny but strange funny—in that you can ignore it for years and then when it brushes by you in a way you didn’t expect, it becomes all you can think about.
For weeks after my ICU stay due to a massive pulmonary embolism, all I could think about was death. It was lurking, overshadowing everything I did or might do. I had come close to dying and now I was certain it was imminent. I was afraid.
And then I turned a corner in my relationship with fear and death. I’m still thinking about it, but not in a way that scares me. It’s a fact of this fragile humanity, that death is how it will end, but in the meantime, we have a lot of choices about how we will live.
I do a lot of reading, and while I don’t feel like my reading habits have changed drastically, I have read more dark/dystopian works in the last year than I had previously, and I find myself practically bombarded with words about life and death.
And I wanted to share them with. Although some are about death, some are about living fully, and some are both, they’ve inspired me on this journey. Maybe they will be that for you, too.
This first one is from Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino.
Every human dies. But the bad news is that every day they act like they don’t know they’re alive.
I actually wrote a whole post about what these words made me want to do. You can read that below.
And then while reading Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, she quoted Marcus Aurelius, who said:
Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun.
I’m not going to lie. I love that so much I might need to get it inked on my body.
In The Bodyguard by Katherine Center, the main character muses:
… death—the threat of it, the promise of it—has its upsides. It helps you remember to be alive, if nothing else. It helps you stop wasting time.
It’s a great winnower, death or the possibility of it. It made me ask: what do I really want to do with my life? That’s where the list of 10 things came in. Read about the start of that below.
The Measure by Nikki Erlick is a tough read if you’re squeamish about death. It’s not graphic but it is all about imminent death. Still, there’s a great takeaway from the book:
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.
This book was one of several things that helped me through the worst of my fears and break through to a life lived more intentionally. You can read more about that journey below.
Life can be hard. The world can be overwhelming. I’ve been tempted to give up in the sense of not trying anymore: to not care about the suffering in the world, to not take care of myself because what’s the point, to give in to despair and just eat chocolate and ice cream and binge watch happy shows.
Reading dystopian fiction has actually helped me not want to stay in that mindset.
In Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (MASTER storyteller, by the way) writes this for one of her characters:
I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.
It can feel like we might never have “good” times in our world again, but there’s not even a chance of it if we don’t make it through our current times. This is a form of hope.
I’m prone to just going with the flow, even if the flow is taking me somewhere that’s not good for me. So, it’s helpful to remember this:
Courage is the root of change—and change is what we’re chemically designed to do … No more holding yourself back. … Design your own future.
This is also from Lessons in Chemistry and is a much more eloquent way of saying what I keep telling myself and others: it doesn’t have to be this way. We can choose a different future for ourselves, for our world. Maybe we can’t make drastic changes, and I’m not suggesting we always have to make drastic changes, but we can take steps toward the future we want. I think it’s key to our survival that we move in the direction of our hopes and dreams.
And one more, just to give you another shot of encouragement. This is from A Down Home Meal for These Difficult Times by Meron Hadero:
There was nothing more dangerous than being cast as an understudy in someone else’s dream.
Be the lead in your own dream, friends! I can’t promise it’s an easy road or immediately attainable, but if the past year has taught me anything, it’s that my dreams—no matter how big, small or out of reach they seem—are worth pursuing because my life matters.
Stick around! This journey is far from over.