Not a Bad Day to Die

Movies at midday are one of the pleasures of aging; the theaters aren't crowded, the tickets are cheaper, and later you can fill up on happy hour hors d'oeuvres and skip dinner.

I was headed for a matinee on a balmy, blue sky spring day a few weeks after a recent decade-changing birthday. Passing a flower market on the corner, I bent my head to the profusion of peonies clustered in tin buckets, breathing in their deep, rich scent. All at once I was literally set back on my heels by a thought that had never once occurred to me before, a thought so fully formed that it sounded like a voice in my head: This wouldn't be a bad day to die.

The censor that pushes the unthinkable back into the unconscious must have been asleep at the wheel. Why this, why now? I wondered. Why, in the midst of feeling so fully alive — so healthy, happy and untroubled — was I suddenly struck by the notion of my own death?

I've lost friends and family members to death, but it's only lately that I've thought much about my own. It's not a preoccupation or obsession — not yet — but it's increasingly taking up space in my head. The friends I was meeting at the theater agreed that, at our age, "If you don't think about dying once a day or more — including doing the math when you read the obituaries — you're in denial."

That consciousness of our mortality happens in unexpected ways at ordinary moments. Death may not be imminent, at least not as far as we know, but it's not unthinkable, either. Some of our closest friends and relatives have already died, and others may be in declining heath or facing a terminal illness.

Our own death is a subject we can talk or think about for only a brief time before we're submerged in sadness, overcome with fear or frozen in disbelief. Yet daring to confront it frees us to fully engage in our own lives and those of the people we love until the last minute. That's the existential telegram we don't always see coming, the real message from the unconscious: Life itself is a terminal diagnosis.

Perhaps you or someone you love has received a more immediate one. The one unexpected gift of living with such news is dying with it; it's an opportunity to examine your life and make meaning of it, finish your unfinished business, express your regrets, make your amends and renew your bonds with those you love.

Of course, you don't have to be dying to do those things. In fact, the sooner you do them, the better: None of us knows when death will come or how we will experience it. We may plan for it, to the extent that we can, and in fact we must. We may hope for a long, slow gentle death with time to say goodbye before surrendering, or perhaps a lucky one, something so quick we never see it coming or suffer the grief of those we leave behind.

The more we know about death, the less there is to fear it. We may approach it in small chunks, or from different perspectives, but we can't put it at the safe distance it used to be. The good news is that facing up to death reconnects us to the richness of living as fully in the moment as we can for as long as we can.

The deaths of friends or acquaintances bring me closer to thinking about my own. Right now, I believe I want to have a "conscious" death, free from pain but not awareness. When the time comes, though, I may change my mind; I thought I wanted a natural, unmedicated childbirth, too! Because I live in a state that has legislated compassionate choice, I have the right, whether or not I have the opportunity, to decide when and how I die.

Until then, though, even the most thorough planning and foresight are not cure-alls for coping with the eventual reality of not being, the terror at the end of the self. "Anxiety is the price we pay for self-awareness; staring into death renders life more poignant, more precious, more vital," as psychoanalyst Irving Yalom writes: "Such an approach to death leads to instruction about life."

We may be too involved in the prosaic quality of our everyday lives to let that terror out of the place we've corralled it — in our nightmares, in the depths of the unconscious, in the assurances of faith that another, better existence awaits us in the kingdom of heaven. Or we may have stored it in the mental compartment where we've contemplated our ultimate end, analyzed and even reasoned with it, and wrestled it to the ground on which we base our beliefs and values.

But sometimes we have an awakening experience, like realizing in a particular moment of contentment or completion — a garden planted, a goal accomplished, a conflict resolved, a problem solved, a question answered, or even a burden lifted — that today wouldn't be a bad day to die. It seems to be a message from the deepest part of the self that is always aware of the fact that we're mortal.

The message stimulates us to let go of ambitions and desires whose wanting drains the pleasure out of what we've already acquired or accomplished. Our imagination may still take us to places and experiences that thrill us to consider, but it may be wiser now to look at our bucket list one last time, cross off what's not important any more, and stop fretting about what often still bugs us; getting to the bottom of it, carrying a grudge, caring what strangers think of us, going places we don't want to go, being with people we really don't like, doing things we no longer enjoy, and especially, saving things for later.

My own bucket list in this autumn of my life is divided into two columns: "Still Theoretically Possible" and "Very Long Shot." What's on the former are a winter in the Caribbean, finishing my memoirs, getting a tattoo, and finding a man who drives at night. On the latter are going around the world, falling in love or even lust again, winning the lottery, and having Oprah choose my still unwritten novel for her book club.

I do not long for death, or await it, as Mary Oliver writes, wondering if I have made something particular and real of my life. I am fortunate in having family and friends who reassure me that I have, and words, written and spoken, that have made a positive difference in the lives of others I will never meet.

I wake up in the morning - and sometimes, lately, after an afternoon nap - pleased and surprised that I'm still here. I believe in the conservation of energy, and that when I die, mine will be absorbed into a cosmic consciousness I'm certain exists outside of time.

If I'm wrong, of course, I'll never know. And that's a comfort too. And meanwhile, I'll stop and smell the peonies.