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In my life, I’ve lost a lot of people. Some I never met because they died before I was born. My mother rarely spoke about her own mother, who also died young, but even as a child I sensed the outline of her absence. The kind of hole that doesn’t heal, it just becomes part of the person.
Over the years I lost friends and more family. The hardest loss was my mother. She reached 45, older than her own mother, but still far too young to die. I only had 25 years with her. I sometimes wonder if I ever fully recovered from that loss. With our history, I felt we never got to really know each other. We were friends as well as family, and then she was gone.
Mortality has always terrified and fascinated me in equal measure. I love horror movies, and murder documentaries make me feel oddly calm, but I cry for strangers who die too young, die old and alone, die frightened or die loved, leaving a crater in someone else’s life.
I’m scared of dying. I can’t breathe thinking about my pets leaving me. Once upon a time my school suggested I should become a mortician, and sometimes I regret not going in that direction.
I’ve rearranged my life a hundred times and I’ll probably do it a hundred more, but this year showed me again that my restlessness wasn’t running away, as some assumed. It was living. Experiencing. Refusing to stand still just because the world prefers tidy boxes.
Why do I reflect on this today? Because I still can. And because I can hand this to Hass and ask him to proofread it, which didn’t feel guaranteed in these last months.
Hass had a heart attack last month. After getting him into the ambulance, watching the paramedics prep him and wheel him out of view, I sat in the hospital waiting room listening to awful Christmas jingles and realised my husband was Schrödinger’s cat. I wouldn’t know if he was alive or dead until someone remembered to tell me.
I also knew that this was the day my mum died sixteen years ago. Losing her was brutal, but there was no limbo. No flicker of hope. No bargaining. No sudden urge to become religious. No wondering what if.
With Hass there was nothing but what if.
What if he really dies.
What do I do.
Where do I go.
How would I shape my life then.
What happens to all our dreams and sandcastles.
We never took each other for granted, but that ninety minutes put things in focus again. As did the operating table for him.
A month later, my own body joined the party. Because why not? Clearly, there wasn’t enough going on already. Stitches around my heart, fatigue, adrenaline spikes, arm aches, maybe teeth, hard to tell. I pushed it away because surely this isn’t how heart attacks work. Not two in the same household within a month. But it didn’t go away. Sitting at work I suddenly couldn’t breathe, my arm hurt, and the chest pain sharpened. And I got scared.
What if this is what my mother felt. What if I repeat that family history. But surely my story doesn’t end like that. I’m the black sheep in the family. Death should arrive differently for me. Preferably on Binky, speaking in CAPITAL LETTERS.
And yet I panicked. I went looking for help. I got an ECG and a hug from the doctor. For the first time in my life I realised death wasn’t theoretical. Not likely, but possible. The axis shifted.
I apologised for causing trouble and he hugged me again and said anxiety can feel like dying, and that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.
So it seems my destiny isn’t dying of a heart attack because my heart is weak or dirty, but because I’ll scare myself to death first.
But here’s the thing: I’m still here. Hass is still here. Today still exists. And if today exists, it can be used. If you’ve been waiting for permission to change something or say something or choose differently, take this as your sign. Life is short, yes. But it’s also astonishingly stubborn, and it keeps handing us chances until it doesn’t.
Use the ones you get. Now, not later.