What would you do if you only had a short time left to live?
This actually happened to me, except I survived. What I thought I would do and what I did, in
fact, do were not the same things.
My extended brush with death came about when I had
congestive heart failure, brought on by treatment for thyroid cancer. Since I
was not really a candidate for congestive heart failure, and hadn’t even heard
of it, by the time I sought medical treatment I was, as the doctor said,
gravely ill. Hearts have an ejection fraction, which is a measurement of how
well they pump out blood. A normal ejection fraction is between 55 and 70. When
it drops down to 40 you get diagnosed and start medication. At my first doctor
visit my ejection fraction was 7. It rarely happens that someone with a heart
as sick as mine was survives, but I did.
There was no sudden healing. I endured a year of simply not dying that day. I expected it at any
moment. Everything I did felt like the last time. There was one day when I
came awfully close to death. I was in the car with my family and my heart went
into an odd rhythm unlike common pvc palpitations. I felt the blood drain out
of my head and started to quietly black out. Then it started beating normally
again. My heart had fibrillated. It was terrifying.
This is what I would have thought I would do when faced with
my own death, and what I actually did.
1 Upon
hearing a diagnosis of probable imminent death I thought I would rapidly cycle
through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and
acceptance. Instead I skipped right past denial and didn’t have the energy to
be angry. I followed all the doctor’s instructions to the letter, which I
suppose could be construed as bargaining. Then
for a while I was plucky: I’m going to beat this! Depression came later and was
massive. It has been seven years and I still haven’t completely reached the
acceptance point. After I survived I wallowed around in depression for years,
then circled back to anger. Acceptance is on my to-do list – not acceptance
that I was going to die, since I didn’t, but acceptance that such a thing could
ever have happened to me. I protest! I’m against it! As for denial, which I had
skipped in the first place, my husband has that one covered.
2 Emotional
reactions aside, it seems like the first thing you would do is get your affairs
in order. The reality is that if you’re so sick you’re about to die you just
don’t have it in you to worry about consolidating bank accounts, updating
wills, and so forth. The life lesson here
is to keep your affairs in order all the time. Also remember that
eventually someone else is going to go through all your drawers.
3 Wouldn’t
your imminent death be a great time to say all those things to people you’d
been needing to say? Some things, yes. I think I told my family a billion times
how much I love them, which wasn’t really news. But when my heart was barely beating the last thing I needed to be
doing was to call up an old boyfriend or someone else from my past and hash
things out or say what they’d meant to me. If you’re too chicken to say
something now you’re not going to be less chicken when you’re at death’s door.
Let’s be realistic.
4 About
that bucket list – do it now. Sick
people don’t tick off items on the list. After I was doing better I did
start work on the novel I always meant to write, and I’m still working on it.
5 They
say your life flashes before your eyes, and I have to agree with that, except
for the flashing part. Since I seemed to be dying a slow death my life spun out
for me slowly. Many memories came back
to me of who I was at all the stages of my life.
What else?
I condensed my life down to just my family. I decided I wasn’t going to spend my
remaining time yelling at my kids about homework and videogames, but to make
sure they knew how much I loved them. Nor was I going to spend it worrying
about my diet, other than the low-sodium diet the doctor had prescribed.
Cleaning house? I mostly couldn’t, so we hired cleaners and said that was clean
enough.
I reevaluated my
religion, throwing out much of the religion and keeping Jesus. I saw
through a lot of big talkers. I saw who really cared about me. I saw plain as
day that God had His hand on me. I stopped letting people waste my time with immature
lessons on spirituality.
I played a lot of World of Warcraft. If you are inclined to
scoff, watch this TED talk, which talks about how playing games increases your
resilience and decreases depression: http://www.ted.com/talks/jane_mcgonigal_the_game_that_can_give_you_10_extra_years_of_life.html
I hadn’t seen the TED talk when I started, but my kids were playing WoW and I
was doing lots of things with them. I
found that the social aspect, the reward system, etc., of games were keeping me
feeling strong and positive.
What do you think you would do if you knew you had a short
time left to live?
