No Cure for Being Human: And Other Truths I Need to Hear

I did not understand that one future comes at the exclusion of all others. Everybody pretends that you die only once. But that’s not true. You can die a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.

...I had nothing to do but survive the feeling that some pain is for no reason at all. It became clearer than ever that life is not a series of choices. So often the experiences that define us are the ones that we didn't pick. Cancer. Betrayal. Miscarriage. Job loss. Mental illness. A novel coronavirus.

Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that’s not true. You can die to a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.

Our lives are not problems to be solved. We can have meaning and beauty and love, but nothing even close to resolution.

So often we are defined by the troubles that we live with rather than the things we conquer. Any persistent suffering requires being afraid. But who can stay awake to fear for so long?

It’s easy to imagine letting go when we forget that choices are luxuries, allowing us to maintain our illusion of control. But until those choices are plucked from our hands—someone dies, someone leaves, something breaks—we are only playing at surrender.

And I didn't know how to say the future was like a language I couldn't speak anymore.

All of our masterpieces, ridiculous. All of our striving, unnecessary. All of our work, unfinished, unfinishable. We do too much, never enough, and are done before we’ve even started. It’s better this way.

To many people, I am no longer just myself. I am a reminder of a thought that is difficult for the rational brain to accept: our bodies might fail at any moment.

People say carpe diem. I mean, yes, unless you need a nap.

I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore. In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned. I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend. I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.

A bucket list disguises a dark question as a challenge: what do you want to do before you die? We all want, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” But do we attain that by listing everything we’ve ever wanted to do? Should we really focus on how many moments we can collect?

But no matter how carefully we schedule our days, master our emotions, and try to wring our best life now from our better selves, we cannot solve the problem of finitude. We will always want more. We need more. We are carrying the weight of caregiving and addiction, chronic pain and uncertain diagnosis, struggling teenagers and kids with learning disabilities, mental illness and abusive relationships.

Sometimes the body is a weight pulling you the way down. And it's hard to love the stone that drowns you.

No matter the temperature, I insist that all impossible decisions must be made outside under the uninterrupted sky. How else could you know you're still alive?

It never occurred to me that every life must be constantly reinvented by adventures and private jokes, and that it might, suddenly, end.

Time really is a circle; I can see that now. We are trapped between a past we can't return to and a future that is uncertain.

It is a strange fact that sometimes the people who love you most will be among the first to stop worrying about you.

I look around me and think, there are the choices I've made. The people I've loved. No matter how fleeting this was, I need them to believe everything mattered. This life was enough. But it's not true, of course. Nothing will add up to enough. I wish someone has told me that the end of a life is a complex equation. Years dwindle into months, months into days, and you must count them. All my dreams and bedtimes with a boy in dinosaur pajamas must be squeezed into hours, minutes, seconds. How should I spend them?

The problem with aspirational lists, of course, is that they often skip the point entirely. Instead of helping us grapple with our finitude, they have approximated infinity. With unlimited time and resources, we could do anything, be anyone. We could become more adventurous by jumping out of airplanes, more traveled by visiting every continent, or more cultured by reading the most famous books of all time. With the right list, we would never starve with the hunger of want. But it is much easier to count items than to know what counts.

takes great courage to live. Period. There are fears and disappointments and failures every day, and, in the end, the hero dies. It must be cinematic to watch us from above.

This will be a hard journey,” he says. “Is there anything you can set down?

It is a mystery to me why some mere minutes transform into moments, hovering outside of time. And how they ebb and flow, stirring wonder and the ache for more. I know the love of a God who is beyond all wanting, but the more I live, the more I want and want and want.

Before the baby, before the diagnosis, before the pandemic. Before. Before when I was earnest and clever and ignorant, I thought, life is a series of choices. I curated my own life until, one day, I couldn't. I had accepted the burden of limitless choices only to find out I had few to make.

If you want progress, take up running. If you want meaning, run a church.

In my finite life, the mundane has begun to sparkle. The things I love—the things I should love—become clearer, brighter.

I must accept the world as it is, or break against the truth of it: my life is made of paper walls. And so is everyone else's.

Everybody pretends that you only die once. But that's not true. You can die a thousand possible futures in the course of a single, stupid life.