A common question that comes up for many is, what if you only had a year to live? A client recently came into session and told me the sculpture, created by Clayton Thiel, that guards the entrance to my office door reminded them of the Celtic warrior goddess Morrigan, a fearless shapeshifter, who was known to traverse between the real world and the afterlife. She could foresee the future and had influence over fertility and sovereignty. Sounds like a Marriage and Family Therapist to me!
Creator/destroyer archetypes, such as Pele or Kali, and protector goddesses, such as Chamunda are particularly resonant for me, and relevant as I sit with the reality we are all going to die and life is a series of cycles of births and deaths.
But what if you only had a year to live?
I’m tickled by the number of clients who recently had babies, and my Year to Live group, based on Stephen Levine’s book of the same name, started this week and will continue for 13 months.
When I meditate on receiving the news I will die in a year, I’m struck with how to balance the urgency to plan and take action, while also practicing presence with each moment and emotion as they arise.
How to prioritize all the ways I want to be of service, as well as value the personal pleasure I want to experience…the friends and family I want to share time with, and places I want to go. I’m curious about how to remain internally spacious when confronted with urgency, knowing many of these experiences will be lasts, not firsts.
I’m compelled to offer my cliff notes to healing trauma through the body and liberating your vibrancy, given all the money, time, and energy I’ve invested in this; as my friend, Jada who died a few years ago said, while kicking her leg up in the air and kissing it, “This body is worth a million bucks!” And while I can’t take it with me, I can vicariously share the wisdom and resources I gathered on my journey.
I intend to surrender my old (trauma) stories, along with all the things I will no longer need, purging and bringing things to the Goodwill, lighten the load for friends who will clean out my house after I’m gone. I picture my heart, like clean laundry, hanging on the line, letting love blow through it, air it out, a fresh start, a fresh ending.
Make room in my heart to give and receive love without fear of expectations and longevity, to experience the unfolding in my heart, emptying file folders of stuff I’ve held onto that is so old the print is fading. I will write new endings, even for this short time I have left. What would you give up if you only has a year to live?
I’ll make lists of whom I will say goodbye to, and finish what has been left incomplete: those 2 books I started, that persistent desire to learn Spanish and pick up sculpting again, take voice lessons, and raise chickens named Harold and Maude. And you? What if you only had a year to live?
The human desire that is most out of my control is to commit my life to someone and become a grandmother, get to be that beloved elder who’s a resource for a child when they need comfort and when they need to believe in themselves or something bigger, who won’t just teach them to stuff their feelings with Jello.
I won’t tell them to shut up, teach them how magical they are, teach them how to trust themselves, how to read and write, enjoy all their senses, and the joy and strength of their miraculous body. I want to celebrate their firsts, their micro-successes.
The easier undertakings: I will regularly pay too much for food that transports me through scent and flavor, have sex that makes me forget space and time, sleep outside more, under a naked, open sky, time in the dirt, in salt water, under pines. But what if you only had a year to live? What would you seek?
I hope to find peace, that all the chronic pain, the gripping in my neck and hips will learn to let go, not have to hold on so tight, to maintain control, and to steer the direction of my life. Knowing what will happen next, perhaps my system will relax. That’s all it wants.
It is the ultimate deadline and what would you do if you only had a year to live? While I’ve been quoted as saying I love a good deadline, I have a love/hate relationship with my ability to drill towards them, cultivating diamonds under pressure.
I aspire to live a more balanced existence and move at a slower pace. The biggest change I could make is prioritizing my own pleasure and time with friends above all else. Such a simple and easy choice to start with.
