HOW DO YOU WANT TO DIE?

I’ve come to understand the importance of thinking about how you want to die.

I don't mean when . . . where. . . or what finally gets you.

Most of that will never be ours to decide.

I mean something much more difficult.

Who do you want to be when you're dying?

I've been thinking about this for the last few days.

I should be clear. . . I don't have an answer.

This isn't something I've figured out and am now handing down from the mountaintop.

But. . . I have some thoughts.

I'm figuring it out as I write this.

And increasingly, I believe that thinking about the man I want to be when I take my last breath might tell me something important about the man I need to become while I'm still taking all the ones before it.

A client of mine named Sheila, married the love of her life.

By every account, they had a phenomenal marriage.

They took care of themselves.

They built a good life.

They had nearly forty years together that she remembers as deeply happy and fulfilling ones.

Then, dementia came for her husband, Don.

For roughly the last five years of his life, the man Sheila loved gradually disappeared.

The person occupying his body could be hostile toward her.

Sometimes. . . unfortunately, frightening.

Sheila is tiny. Four foot eleven. Seventy pounds dripping wet.

Don was about my size. . . Six foot five, two hundred and twenty five pounds.

Even when he frightened her, she stayed.

She cared for him.

Refused to put him in a home.

She loved the man he had been even when that man could no longer reliably appear.

But those five years left scars on the forty that came before them.

There is something unbearably unfair about that.

And it's important to say this at the beginning because otherwise this essay could accidentally make a promise I don't believe.

Living well does not guarantee that you will die well.

Disease can take our minds.

Injury can alter our personalities.

We can lose all versions of consciousness as we know it now.

We can become frightened or confused or unrecognizable through absolutely no moral failure of our own.

Don didn't choose what happened to him.

As it turns out, there are limits to agency.

But there are also people who maintain their faculties until very near the end.

My father was one of them.

And his story has been bothering me lately.

Nearly twenty years ago, I got the phone call you're never prepared to receive.

‘Come say goodbye to your dad.’

He had gone to the hospital thinking he had a particularly nasty flu.

Instead, the doctors discovered that his heart was catastrophically damaged.

They couldn't believe he was up and walking around.

Apparently my father had been experiencing heart attacks for years. . . and simply powered through them.

His heart was in such bad condition that none of the heart surgeons would even operate on him.

Turns out heart surgeons live and die on their success rates.

Eventually, one courageous surgeon agreed.

But only after being brutally clear with my family.

This wasn't a rescue.

At best, it was borrowed time.

Six months, perhaps. Nine?

Maybe, just maybe. . . a year, if we were lucky.

Just enough time for my father to get his affairs in order.

The condition was, the family didn’t go into this with the false hope of another chapter.

We were to go into this knowing that, at best, we’d get a flicker of time to say goodbye and prepare for the inevitable.

We agreed.

My father defied all odds and survived the surgery.

But then, my he survived six months.

Then another three.

Then, it was a year. And another.

Eventually, my father lived for seventeen more years.

Seventeen years after we had gathered to say goodbye. . .

After we were told the survivability probability was around 3% for the surgery alone.

Much less, the first year.

There is something extraordinary about that.

Something about those seventeen years has been sitting differently with me lately.

My father was an enormously stubborn man.

Big hands. Deep voice. Strong opinions.

He could explain his beliefs with the confidence of a scientist explaining gravity.

He was also afraid of the world.

I’ve come to realize that my mother broke his heart when she left him.

I was five.

I don't know that something inside him ever completely recovered.

The experience seemed to calcify an existing belief that the world was fundamentally full of danger.

His response was vigilance.

Control.

Certainty.

He would deadbolt the patio door every time he walked through it while the family was outside on a Sunday afternoon.

The world could get you.

People could hurt you.

Something bad was probably coming.

So you stayed ready.

And in some ways that philosophy worked.

The man was told he had months to live and somehow bullied another seventeen years out of his heart.

There were good years among them.

There was laughter.

Family.

Christmases at my father's house after his surgery became the first family ritual I obeyed in my entire life.

Before that, I spent many Christmases alone.

After that, I made it to Tucson for every single one.

Eventually though, time, and the worsening prognosis took it’s toll.

My father became tired of waiting to die.

And terrified that he actually would.

His body narrowed his world.

Walking became difficult because he couldn't catch his breath.

All form of exercise disappeared. He spent more time in his chair, reading the news on his phone.

And the more frightened he became, the angrier he seemed to become.

His world contracted.

Then his thinking contracted with it.

Fear became frustration.

Frustration became certainty.

Certainty became judgment.

And somewhere along the way, grumpy old Dad telling everyone how the world worked became something harder.

He became a tyrant sometimes.

Mostly with his kids.

Me included.

Sometimes with his wife.

We gave him latitude because we knew what was underneath it.

He was scared.

But my father was almost incapable of saying I'm scared.

He couldn't cry with us.

He couldn't tell us that he didn't know what came next.

He couldn't easily allow vulnerability to replace authority.

So fear had to come out somewhere.

It came out sideways.

Years later, something happened that complicated my understanding of my father.

A stranger contacted me through Facebook.

It was a young woman, who had undergone a quadruple bypass at thirty years old.

She somehow found my father through an online support community for heart patients.

She wanted me to know what my dad had done for her.

He had encouraged her.

Guided her.

Comforted her.

Helped her understand what recovery would be like.

Apparently, during one of the most frightening periods of her life, my father had been an extraordinary source of kindness.

Compassion. Empathy.

I remember reading her description of him and thinking, ‘Who the hell is she talking about’?

I knew my father was capable of tenderness.

But this stranger had encountered a version of him that his own family rarely got to experience during those years.

And that makes his story much more complicated for me.

Because the tender man wasn't gone.

He was still in there.

He understood fear intimately enough to help another frightened person navigate it.

He simply struggled to bring that same vulnerability across the last few feet to the people who loved him most.

His family.

I find that heartbreaking.

And instructive.

Maybe the defenses that helped my father survive his life eventually made it harder for him to surrender it.

Because death asks us to do almost everything those defenses were built to prevent.

You cannot control it.

You cannot outwork it.

You cannot outmuscle it.

You cannot know enough to defeat it.

You cannot deadbolt the door against it.

Eventually, if we're fortunate enough to remain conscious and ourselves, there is only the unimaginable task of accepting what we cannot control.

When I was eighteen, shortly after a motorcycle accident that could have ended very differently, I picked up a book called The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

I barely read it.

I think I made it through the first chapter.

But something in those few pages has stayed with me for more than thirty years.

As I remember it, the author described witnessing the deaths of two Buddhist teachers.

Both were good men. Both had devoted their lives to spiritual practice.

But they died differently.

One died afraid.

The other seemed to meet death with such peace that his dying actually gave peace to the people around him.

At eighteen, that idea fascinated me.

At fifty-one, it feels like an assignment.

Because I'm beginning to wonder whether learning how to die is something we're doing our entire lives.

Maybe every time we accept a loss without allowing it to make us bitter, we're practicing.

Every time we admit we're frightened instead of converting fear into anger.

Every time we apologize.

Every time we allow someone to care for us.

Every time we say I don't know.

Every time we surrender an identity that no longer fits.

Every time we forgive something that cannot be repaired.

Every time life refuses to obey us and we somehow remain ourselves anyway.

Maybe those are rehearsals.

One of my favorite quotes about life came from one of my favorite writers of all time. . . The late, great Hunter S. Thompson.

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming 'Wow! What a Ride!'"

I love that philosophy.

It hits somewhere primal in me.

And lately it has made some things about where I am in life easier to accept.

I don't have everything I thought I would have by now.

But Jesus Christ, have I lived.

I've lived in several other countries and wandered through many, many more.

I've met remarkable people through my thirty years in and around Hollywood.

I've loved beautiful humans and had beautiful humans love me.

I've experienced heartbreak profound enough to dismantle the person I thought I was.

I've nearly died more than once.

I've experimented with consciousness and spent college nights wandering around inside universes revealed by magic mushrooms.

I've known what it is to love dogs and, perhaps more importantly, to know the joy of a dog’s love.

I've rediscovered what happens to me in the mountains.

I've succeeded.

I've failed spectacularly.

I've gotten lost.

I've found myself.

I've lost myself again.

I've spent years drinking heavily enough that pieces of my own history disappeared from me, and I've experienced the strange gift of watching some of those memories return as I get farther away from those years.

There are things missing from my bank account that are abundant in my memory.

So yes.

I want the Thompson death.

Use the machine.

Scratch the paint.

Put some miles on it.

Arrive thoroughly spent.

But my father's life has made me realize that's only half of the assignment.

Because there are actually two questions.

Did you live fully?

And. . .

Did you become someone capable of letting life go?

I want both.

I want the broadside skid.

And I want the peaceful final breath.

The surgeon told us the operation might give my father enough time to get his affairs in order.

He got seventeen years instead.

But something occurred to me while writing this. . .

Putting your affairs in order and putting yourself in order are not the same thing.

We know what the first means.

Write the will.

Organize the accounts.

Give someone the passwords.

Tell the family where the important papers are.

Decide who gets the watch.

But what would it mean to put yourself in order?

Who still needs to hear that you love them?

Who deserves an apology?

What are you still carrying that you could put down?

What are you afraid of?

Who haven't you forgiven?

What haven't you forgiven yourself for?

Can you allow people to care for you?

Can you say you don't know?

Can you lose your strength without losing your dignity?

Can you become dependent without becoming cruel?

Can you admit that you're terrified?

Can you cry in front of your children?

Can you look at your life without requiring it to have been different?

Those aren't questions for the dying.

I'm beginning to think they're questions for Tuesday.

So lately I've been trying to imagine him.

The old man who, if fortune allows, will someday take my last breath.

I don't know where he is.

Maybe there's a hospital room.

Maybe I'm home.

Maybe there's someone holding my hand.

Maybe I'm alone.

I don't know what happened between this morning and that one.

I don't know whether I became wealthy.

I don't know whether The Guy's Guy became what I hope it can become.

I don't know who loved me.

I don't know who left.

I don't know what else I built.

I don't know how many dogs there were.

I don't know how badly the world kicked my ass between here and there.

And I don't know whether that man is afraid.

I suspect he will be.

Peace doesn't require fearlessness.

But I hope he isn't ashamed of being afraid.

I hope the people around him don't have to guess whether he loves them.

I hope there aren't apologies sitting unsaid in his throat.

I hope he doesn't need to explain to everyone how the world works.

I hope he can receive care.

I hope he can cry.

I hope he can laugh.

I hope he can look backward at the ridiculous collection of victories, failures, women, friends, dogs, mountains, movies, mistakes, motorcycles, heartbreaks, Christmas mornings, stupid decisions, beautiful accidents and ordinary Tuesdays that somehow became one human life and think. . .

Yes.

That was mine.

Not perfect.

Not optimized.

Not everything I wanted.

But mine.

And I was there for it.

Then maybe dying could feel, at least a little, like sleep coming after a day well lived.

I have no idea whether I'll get that death.

Neither do you.

Sheila and Don taught me that there are things waiting for us that no amount of wisdom can prepare us for.

But my father taught me something else.

If I am fortunate enough to remain myself until the end, I don't want to wait until I'm dying to figure out how to be the man I hope to be when I die.

Maybe that's why it's worth thinking about death while life is still abundant.

Not because the clock is terrifying.

Because the clock is useful.

There is still time to practice.

There is still time to put ourselves in order.

There is still time to become someone capable of living ferociously and, when the moment finally comes, letting go peacefully.

And maybe that's one of the strangest things death can teach us.

How we want to leave can tell us an awful lot about how we ought to live.