Note IV — The Man Who Survived His Own Death

Notes from a Life I Was Not Promised — Note IV

On mortality, borrowed years, and the peculiar burden of an unexpected future.

There was a time when I believed I knew approximately when I would die.

Thirty.

What a ridiculous number! Thirty! An age at which other men begin to speak seriously of their futures, of marriages, children, careers, houses, and all those ordinary arrangements through which human beings attempt to establish some permanence in a world that guarantees none.

For me, thirty was something else.

A boundary.

A conclusion.

A number beyond which I was not expected to exist.

I had been told that I might not live beyond it.

And what does one do with such information?

One might imagine that a man confronted with the possibility of an early death would become extraordinarily wise. That he would immediately abandon his trivial concerns, embrace the beauty of existence, forgive his enemies, and devote his remaining years to the things that truly matter.

What nonsense!

I did no such thing.

I became impatient.

Terribly impatient.

I wanted to do everything, and I wanted to do it immediately.

There were degrees to obtain, professions to pursue, countries to visit, ideas to investigate, and a thousand other things that seemed intolerable to leave unfinished.

I began to live as though death were standing somewhere behind me, watching with an increasingly irritated expression as I attempted to complete one more task.

And perhaps it was.

But what an absurd relationship I developed with time!

Other people appeared to possess years. I possessed deadlines.

They spoke of what they might do someday. I spoke of what I must do now.

They could afford to hesitate, reconsider, postpone, or begin again.

I believed I could afford none of these luxuries.

And so I hurried.

I hurried through education.

I hurried through work.

I hurried toward ambitions that might otherwise have taken decades.

And in my hurry, I made decisions that I now find almost impossible to explain.

I took the first opportunities that presented themselves. I accepted paths before I had properly considered where they might lead. I made choices that, viewed from the comfortable distance of the present, appear strange, sometimes unreasonable, perhaps even foolish.

And yet, at the time, they made perfect sense.

For what is a foolish decision to a man who believes he has little time left?

Is it not more foolish, from his perspective, to wait?

To deliberate?

To examine every possibility while the days continue disappearing?

I was not always choosing what was best. I was choosing what was available. I was not always asking whether a particular path was right for me. I was asking whether I could afford to let it pass.

And I could not.

Or so I believed.

How many of my decisions, I wonder, were truly mine? How many were made by the invisible presence of an ending I had already accepted?

I do not regret them all. Indeed, some of those hurried decisions brought me to places I might never otherwise have reached. Others led to difficulties that a more patient man might have avoided.

But I cannot judge the man I was entirely by the knowledge of the man I have become.

He was acting under a different understanding of time.

And perhaps that is what makes hindsight such an unreliable judge. It condemns us for not possessing information that only the passage of years could provide.

I called this determination.

I called it discipline.

I called it ambition.

And perhaps it was all these things.

But I must confess something less flattering.

Much of it was fear.

Fear that I would leave the world before I had done anything worthwhile.

Fear that the possibilities I could imagine would remain forever unrealized.

Fear that my existence would end before I had managed to prove, to myself if to no one else, that it had meant something.

And here is the peculiar cruelty of such fear: it can make a man extraordinarily productive while depriving him of the ability to enjoy what he produces.

For every accomplishment immediately becomes evidence of how much remains unfinished.

Every success reveals another possibility.

Every completed ambition creates another obligation.

One does not arrive anywhere.

One merely discovers the next thing that must be done before time runs out.

I sometimes wonder whether I truly wanted to accomplish so much, or whether I wanted to leave behind sufficient evidence that I had existed.

A degree.

A publication.

A professional achievement.

Something bearing my name.

Something that might survive the disappearance of the person who created it.

How strange that a man, fearing the end of his life, should attempt to preserve himself through things that cannot possibly contain him.

For what is a name printed upon a page?

What is a qualification?

What is professional recognition?

They may be valuable, certainly. They may benefit others. They may contribute something, however modest, to the world.

But they cannot substitute for a life.

And yet I pursued them as though, if I accumulated enough, death might find me sufficiently accomplished to be satisfied.

Then came my thirtieth birthday.

And I was alive.

What an extraordinary disappointment for death!

Or perhaps death had never made an appointment at all. Perhaps I had merely mistaken a possibility for a promise, a prognosis for a verdict, an uncertainty for a certainty.

But such distinctions are easier to appreciate afterward.

For years, the number thirty had occupied my imagination with the authority of a final sentence.

And then I crossed it.

Nothing happened.

The world did not stop.

The heavens did not open.

No great explanation was offered for my continued existence.

There was simply another morning.

And another.

I turned thirty-one.

And now, thirty-two.

Three birthdays I had once imagined might never arrive.

And what a strange thing it is to live beyond the boundaries of one’s own expectations.

I ought to be happy, should I not?

Indeed, what right have I to complain?

I have been given years I did not expect. I have witnessed mornings I once feared would never belong to me. I have been permitted to continue an existence whose continuation I had learned to regard as uncertain.

Surely gratitude is the only reasonable response.

And I am grateful.

But gratitude, I have discovered, is not the same as happiness.

One can be grateful to be alive and still be lonely.

One can appreciate the gift of another year and still find the ordinary business of living exhausting.

One can understand the extraordinary improbability of one’s continued existence and still wake on certain mornings with no particular enthusiasm for the day ahead.

Does this make me ungrateful?

Perhaps.

Or perhaps human beings are simply incapable of sustaining the emotional purity that their circumstances appear to demand.

A man rescued from death does not cease to be a man.

He remains irritable, vain, uncertain, ambitious, occasionally foolish, and vulnerable to the same disappointments that trouble everyone else.

Survival does not transform him into a saint.

Nor does it relieve him of the burden of being human.

But there is another difficulty, one that has only recently begun to trouble me.

I had organized my life around an anticipated ending.

And now that ending has failed to arrive.

What am I supposed to do?

I know how absurd this sounds.

A man complains because he has been given more time!

What an ungrateful creature!

And yet the question remains.

For when one has spent years living under the pressure of a shortened future, the disappearance of that pressure does not immediately produce freedom.

It produces uncertainty.

I had learned how to hurry.

I had learned how to prioritize.

I had learned how to sacrifice the present for the possibility of accomplishing something before the future disappeared.

But I had never learned how to live without a deadline.

I knew how to prepare for the possibility of death.

I did not know how to prepare for the continuation of life.

And perhaps that is the most unsettling consequence of surviving one’s own expectations.

The future, which had once seemed so small, suddenly becomes vast.

Not necessarily secure.

Not necessarily predictable.

But open.

And openness, I am discovering, can be as frightening as limitation.

For a limited future tells a man what he must do.

An open future asks him what he actually wants.

And I am not certain that I know.

And yet something has changed.

I find myself, once again, standing before a decision about my future. This time it concerns the next direction of my academic career. There are possibilities to consider, institutions to evaluate, paths that might lead to entirely different lives.

And for the first time, I do not feel compelled to seize the first opportunity that presents itself.

I can wait.

What an extraordinary sentence!

I can wait.

Once, such words would have seemed almost irresponsible. Waiting was a luxury reserved for people who believed they had decades ahead of them. I had no patience for it. I took what came, made what I could of it, and moved forward before the opportunity disappeared.

But now I find myself considering my choices with an unfamiliar calm.

I do not need to decide immediately.

I do not need to accept the first possibility merely because it exists.

I may consider what I truly want, what kind of work I wish to pursue, what sort of life I hope to construct around it.

For I have begun to believe that I have time.

Time!

How casually I write the word now, as though it were something I possessed in abundance.

As though the future were a vast estate recently transferred into my name.

And perhaps this is the greatest absurdity of all.

Having spent years believing that time was running out, I have now begun to behave as though I have all the time in the world.

What a remarkable transformation!

And what a dangerous one, perhaps.

For who has promised me this time?

Certainly not the physicians.

Certainly not the world.

And God, if He is listening, has made no such declaration either.

Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether the Almighty, having watched me spend years hurrying toward an ending that did not arrive, might now find some amusement in watching me finally learn to wait.

I hope He does not decide to play a little mischief with my newfound confidence.

Forgive me, Lord, but the timing would be rather cruel.

For just as I have begun to believe that tomorrow may be taken for granted, I am reminded that tomorrow has never belonged to me.

Perhaps this is the peculiar comedy of human existence.

When we believe we have little time, we rush.

When we believe we have plenty, we postpone.

And in neither condition do we actually know how much remains.

Still, I would rather live with this new uncertainty than return to the old terror.

I would rather make my next decision because it is right for me than because I am afraid there will never be another.

Perhaps that is what growing older has given me.

Not wisdom, exactly.

But the possibility of patience.

Do I still want everything I once pursued?

Do I still believe that accomplishment is the measure of a life well lived?

Do I wish to continue moving between cities, collecting experiences, accumulating distinctions, and demanding more of myself with every passing year?

Or do I wish, perhaps, for something smaller?

An ordinary life.

A home.

People with whom to share the passing of time.

Days that need not justify themselves through productivity.

An evening in which I may sit quietly without feeling that I have betrayed some invisible obligation to accomplish more.

How strange that these ordinary desires should now seem more difficult to pursue than the extraordinary ambitions of my youth.

For I know how to work.

I know how to set goals.

I know how to endure difficulty in pursuit of something distant.

But I do not know how to be content.

And perhaps I have never seriously attempted to learn.

I have treated life as a project.

A project with objectives, milestones, deliverables, and an anticipated completion date.

And now the completion date has disappeared.

What remains?

The project continues, certainly.

There is always more to do.

But I have begun to question whether the purpose of life can be discovered through the successful completion of tasks.

For if I had died at thirty, would my life have been incomplete?

In one sense, of course. There would have been things I had not accomplished, places I had not visited, people I had not met.

But is any life ever complete?

Does a man who dies at eighty leave nothing unfinished?

Does another decade resolve the contradictions of existence?

Does age eventually grant us the satisfaction of having done enough?

I suspect not.

Perhaps every life ends in the middle of something.

An unfinished conversation.

An unanswered question.

A plan for next week.

A book left open.

A promise one intended to keep.

And perhaps the tragedy of death is not merely that it ends our existence, but that it interrupts the illusion that we might one day finish living.

What, then, was I hurrying toward?

Completion?

But completion was never possible.

Immortality through achievement?

But achievement cannot preserve the consciousness that gave rise to it.

Happiness?

But happiness, as I have learned, does not arrive obediently at the conclusion of a successful plan.

Perhaps I was simply afraid.

And perhaps that fear gave me something valuable, even as it took something from me.

It gave me urgency.

It taught me not to assume that opportunities would remain available forever.

It encouraged me to attempt things I might otherwise have postponed indefinitely.

But it also taught me to regard rest as waste, hesitation as weakness, and ordinary happiness as something that could wait until the important work was finished.

And now I must confront the possibility that the important work will never be finished.

There will always be another ambition.

Another responsibility.

Another reason to postpone living.

Unless, of course, I decide otherwise.

But can a man simply decide to change the habits through which he has survived?

Can he abandon the urgency that once protected him without feeling that he has abandoned himself?

I do not know.

Perhaps it will take years.

Perhaps I shall never entirely succeed.

Even now, I sometimes feel the old impatience returning. The need to accomplish more, to move faster, to make the most of every available opportunity.

And perhaps some part of that impatience will always remain.

But I no longer wish to confuse the fear of dying with the art of living.

There is a difference.

A profound difference.

The first asks how much one can accomplish before time runs out.

The second asks what makes the time itself worth experiencing.

I have spent years answering the first question.

I am only beginning to understand the second.

And perhaps that is what my thirty-second birthday signifies.

Not victory over death.

Not proof that I am somehow exceptional.

Not even the fulfillment of a promise.

But the recognition that I have reached a point beyond which I once struggled to imagine myself.

The future has not ended.

And neither have I.

There is something both beautiful and terrifying about this.

For I must now confront a possibility I had scarcely prepared for.

I may grow old.

I may live long enough to see my ambitions change, my convictions weaken, my relationships transform, and my understanding of myself become unrecognizable.

I may experience failures I have not yet imagined.

I may discover joys for which I have made no plans.

I may spend years pursuing things that eventually cease to matter to me.

I may find myself, at forty or fifty, asking questions that would have seemed ridiculous to the man I am today.

And perhaps that is not a tragedy.

Perhaps that is simply what it means to have a future.

For so long, I treated every additional year as something borrowed.

A bonus.

An extension.

Time granted beyond what I had expected.

But perhaps I should stop thinking of these years as borrowed.

Borrowed from whom?

To whom must they be repaid?

What obligation have I incurred merely by continuing to exist?

I did not choose the uncertainty that once surrounded my future.

Nor did I choose to survive beyond it.

And perhaps I need not spend the rest of my life attempting to justify either circumstance.

Perhaps the years ahead do not require extraordinary accomplishments to deserve being lived.

Perhaps an ordinary day, spent without urgency, is not a betrayal of the time I have been given.

Perhaps I am permitted to grow older without transforming every birthday into an examination of whether I have done enough.

I do not know whether I shall manage this.

Tomorrow I may return to my old habits.

I may open my books, examine my unfinished work, construct another plan, and convince myself that the next achievement is essential.

Perhaps I shall continue doing this for years.

But tonight, at thirty-two, I wish to entertain a different possibility.

That I need not spend every moment preparing for an ending.

That I may allow the future to remain uncertain without treating uncertainty as an enemy.

That I may pursue ambitions because they interest me, rather than because I fear leaving them unfinished.

That I may rest without guilt.

That I may live without constantly demanding evidence that my life has been worthwhile.

For there was a time when I believed I would never reach this age.

And yet I have.

I do not know what lies beyond it.

I do not know how many birthdays remain.

I do not know whether the life ahead will resemble the one I once imagined.

But perhaps, for once, I need not know.

The future is here.

Unfinished.

Unpromised.

And so am I.

Still here.