And it came to me then, that every plan is a tiny prayer to Father Time,
as I stared at my shoes in the ICU that reeked of piss and 409.
And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself that I’d already taken too much today,
as each descending peak on the LCD took you a little farther away from me.
Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines,
in a place where we only say goodbye,
it stung like a violent wind that our memories depend on a faulty camera in our minds.
I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose than to never have lain beside at all.
And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground, as the TV entertained itself.
‘Cause there’s no comfort in the waiting room,
just nervous pacers bracing for bad news.
Then the nurse comes ‘round and everyone lifts their heads.
I’m thinking of what Sarah said- that ‘love is watching someone die.’
So who’s going to watch you die (Gibbard and Harmer)?
Who will watch you die? Who will sit in a wooden chair pressed against your bedside, soothing you, though they themselves feel their hearts rip another inch with each ragged breath you pull? Who will stay with you, in that chair, even after your heart stops? If love is watching someone die, then who loves you? Are you sure? Do you love them? These are the questions that fill my head each time I hear this song. The lyrics hypnotize me; I sit spellbound, unable to think of anything else. You may think it a bit dramatic, but I wake up some days with those last two lines already pushing their way through the morning fog in my mind, leaving behind a dewy layer of “what-ifs.”
What if tomorrow you decide to get that checkup you have been long overdue for, and the doctor notices an irregularity? “Just a few simple tests” he would say. Then the next week he would call you in to give you the results, which you would think a little odd (why can he not just tell you over the phone?). Then, standing in his office, he would soberly explain the details of the fatal disease he found coursing through your body. Who would allow themselves, knowing this, to begin to or continue to love you if they knew you would be gone in one year, eight months, or six weeks? How much are you worth to people? By agreeing to such a commitment, to love you, a person would be consciously paving the road of their lives ahead for pain, an intriguing thought all on its own. This would require selflessness, bravery, and vulnerability because it would be signing oneself up to watch you deteriorate. I might mention that these three requirements are all ingredients of love. Were it not for compassion, we, as human beings with some animalistic tendencies, would run away from situations such as the one I have laid out here. However, as we do have this compassionate, caring aspect of our make-up, we see that it leads us to an unattractive choice. Our first option is to turn our back and detach ourselves from you, yet because we are sympathetic, we realize that in doing so we leave you to go through the greatest and last ordeal of your life alone. Therefore, in the end we still feel pain, in the form of regret or guilt, though it may be delayed. Our only alternative is to determine to support you, and by doing so, we willingly open ourselves up to the eventuality of the throbbing pain of loss. There is no win in this scenario.
We are an assuming people. I say this because we presuppose that plans are ours to make or break, and because we ignore the reality of unexpected or early death- both the possibility of our own and of others’. Everyone plans, whether they consider themselves to be a by-the-book scheduler or whether they see themselves as living in the spur of the moment. I include myself in this blanket statement. Yesterday I bought a large whiteboard to hang in my room. On it, I have sectioned off areas for each day of the week and filled them with everything I could think of. I have entries in my planner and alarms set on my phone to help me remember all of my obligations. This is planning on a lower scale; in the same fashion, we also plan out our lives. We lay out our careers like we do clothes on our beds when we are looking for the right outfit. We dream of going to other countries and make lists of the things we want to accomplish before we die. What I want to know is if this is a bad thing. After all, what are we, as students, business people, and households without our plans? The disheartening answer is unorganized, boring, and unproductive. On the other hand, what would we do if the aforementioned visit to the doctor occurred? We would be left with a most tragic and disappointing circumstance- a life’s worth of plans and no time in which to complete them.
From a lighter perspective, consider how less stressful our lives would be if we simply lightened our load a little. Our society encourages us to schedule every moment and a scrawled-through planner with plenty of eraser marks is well looked upon. Visualize your life as a piece of notebook paper. Chances are that you have chosen college-ruled so that you have more lines with which you can cram more activities in, and that every millimeter of the page is covered with scribbles. What if we lived leaving the margins blank? Think of not only how much more relaxed we would be, but also of the opportunities it would afford us. By living in this manner, we leave space for the unexpected, time to help others, and time to rejuvenate ourselves.
I do not intend to come across as morbid or expecting to die any day; I merely believe that we when we think about death, we can use it as a catalyst to spark other topics, such as who loves us and who we love, the extent to which we plan out our lives, and the realization that we are given no guarantee on life tomorrow.
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