Today I Am to Die, Essay Example

I have been granted time alone to write a testament before I close my eyes for the last time. I want to write about the things I have loved in life, experiences I have cherished, ideas that have brought me liberation, beliefs I have outgrown, convictions I have lived by, things I have lived for, insights I have gained in the school of life, the risks I took, the dangers I have courted, the sufferings that seasoned me, the people, occupations, books, and events that have shaped my life, and to finish it all with my life’s achievements.

I have tasted, smelled, touched, seen, heard many things in my life, but like everyone I have special memories of only a few of them, first experienced as a child.  Memories that, for no particular reason, have stayed with me: the sudden and unexpected but eagerly remembered taste of real summer fruit after a long year without them; and the taste of a wooden clarinet-reed in my mouth. The smell of crayons, when I rubbed them thickly against drawing paper, the smell of a leather baseball glove. The sight of Christmas gifts under the tree at dawn, when I still believed in Santa Claus; and the sound of turtle doves in the yard of my grandmother’s house in the morning, a sound I can never hear without thinking of my vacations there; and my first memories of pop tunes heard over the radio, which I listened to by the hour. And lying in bed at night, staring at the bright hallway light, thinking about how the universe just goes on and on and on . . .

How funny it is to try to think of the experiences I cherish the most – my mind goes blank. But, growing a bit older now, I think of the sensation of first riding a bike on my own, as my father pretended to talk to a neighbor; seeing my first school crush unexpectedly leave a theater one night as I arrived for a later show; the first movie I went to see alone, and how I wrote down the lead actor’s name, and how, years later, that same movie left me cold. The fear I felt upon being called to the front of class to make a report. The experience, behind a backstop at the schoolyard, of first being seriously informed of the meaning of certain words we kids freely used without knowing anything about them. My first airplane flight, seeing the earth below and how it looked like a quilt, and how my mother complained later that the stewardesses only paid attention to the men in First Class. The time, eating lunch at the school cafeteria, when I realized for the first conscious time that when I eat or talk, only my lower jaw moves, not my upper teeth, which remain fixed. I remember still how surprised I was.

Still older, I remember a teacher in History class remarking on how ordinary matters are often reported as urgent news, as though they were a crisis, and how others nodded knowingly, as I did. And staring at the cigarette pack in a hated teacher’s shirt pocket.

A young adult now, I grew increasingly liberated by a sense of revulsion to many things in popular culture, things that I increasingly ignore or refuse to worship. I kept it a secret, lest I lose my friends. Our own secret gardens of thought are liberating. I was liberated when we moved to a new neighborhood, and I left a non-friend behind. I was liberated to walk to school alone. Solitude can be liberating, like the solitude I have now, writing this.

The sight of things jarred me into thought: the quiet, unheralded obituaries of people killed on the highways. The obituaries of the unheralded murdered. I lost my belief in my own personal specialness, that specialness that we seem to need to make sense of our world and carry on. Chance rules us, chance decides. It’s hard to assimilate. I haven’t quite done it yet, and granted a reprieve by fate, probably never would.

I outgrew my belief in the wisdom of authority, be it clerical, scientific, or lay. Wisdom lies close to the ground, not in the clouds. Yet there is stupidity, and stupid people, in both places. I outgrew my belief — and for awhile it was a belief, a real belief — that I personally would never grow old. I outgrew the belief that I am personally more insightful than others. The Web has taught me that.

I gained new personal convictions, and found that they were and are the same old ones: the necessity of honesty in dealing with others. The necessity of lying on occasion, and a firm moral certainty that there is nothing wrong with doing that. The conviction that you should work as hard as you can when you have the opportunity to efficiently do so. The conviction that most people will, when given the opportunity. The conviction that there will always be good and evil in the world, and that grand attempts to increase the former and decrease the latter will always fail.

I have lived to try to increase my own personal freedom without being disloyal to the ones closest to me. I have often failed. I have lived to hurt those whom I hated, and have often failed, failed so often that on the rare occasions I have succeeded, I’m not sure what to do with the memory.

I have tried to live for common courtesy to others, and have been outraged when they failed to act that way to me. I have lived to see myself do exactly the same thing that I have complained about. The memory of those times is making my last day less painful, almost as if my death today is a deserved retribution.

We all gain insights into the school of life, a school we never graduate from, even in death, because death comes whenever it wants. Death doesn’t graduate us from the school of life. It makes us truants. It expels us. One insight I have into human nature is that, in one way or another, we all treasure honesty, competence, success in its myriad forms — the pursuit of happiness, that beautiful eighteenth-century phrase. And I’ve learned that we are prepared to inflict whatever unhappiness is necessary on others to achieve it. In other words, I’ve learned the insight into paradox, the shadow that never leaves us alone in our lives, day or night.

I’ve learned that love can die, and I think it usually does if we live long enough. Perhaps it always does. I’ve seen it die in myself and I’ve seen it die in others. I’ve learned that loyalty and love can be two very different things. Another insight I’ve learned is to wonder whether loyalty outlasts love. I suspect it does, because loyalty, after all, is self-love, self respect.

I’ve learned one great insight into spirituality: that it is not always the same thing as religion. It may be that religion is really just a kind of users’ manual for spirituality, an attempt perhaps to harness a universal need to think about and face and deal with the unknown. But I’ve learned that raw, ungoverned spirituality always survives. Another insight I’ve had is that there are spiritual people and non-spiritual people — and that you can’t always tell which is which, and when you can, you are not always happy with the result.

I sometimes wondered if we don’t take the greatest risks as children. I’m reminded of this on the rare occasions, as an adult, when I’ve had an accident and felt sharp physical pain: a cut, a scrap, a burn, a bruise. All of those feelings now give me a brief feeling of nostalgia. As adults we have learned how to avoid those things, and most of us only rarely fail to do so. And yet, dying before my time, I see that old age will gradually bring back those pains of childhood. I will be spared that. But in only growing older and not yet old, those minor pains diminish, they are replaced by potentially lethally larger ones. And those are just the physical risks.

In growing older the non-physical risks grow exponentially. I have risked many of these things, in laws I have broken repeatedly, often at the risk of others. In the bad investments made, the things I have said, sometimes inadvertently to others, or misconstrued. I often wonder how and why I survived, or what is in store for me in some other world, if there is one. Sometimes, at any odd moment, I almost feel my blood pressure fall at the close calls I have had. Ignorance torments children, but for adults, stupidity is our devil. And yet thinking of examples that I could bring myself to write about now, how trite they sound, so trite that I can’t bring myself to tell them. As for the others, to paraphrase into English a greater writer than I, they are written in a book that won’t permit itself to be read. Reader, do you know what I mean? I think you do.

As I’ve grown older still, I’ve become seasoned by both my close calls and successes. I’ve become seasoned by perspective. Some perspectives seem so obvious to me now that I can’t quite believe those views were invisible to me when I was younger. And yet they were invisible to me. But perspective requires memory, and with memory comes happiness and wisdom, but, always, regret. Regret is surely one of the great curses of those who are granted, like I am, the knowledge of their imminent death. Those who are continually busy and working and consciously climbing up, or, without knowing it, slipping down the ladder of success, wherever it may lead them, have little time for either personal perspective and the shadows and memories that come with it. As a result they are spared its pains. But of course they are spared its benefits as well. In my solitude I can look out and see them now, unaware of me, and intent of their own missions. Sometimes, I feel sorry for them. We see ourselves — and others — most clearly on the edge.

Who and what has influenced me? Not grand things or people or events. Rather smaller ones: a teacher emphasizing how real artists always economize; quiet professional competence in the workplace; the magic of someone who can draw; the lethality of a word; treasured books, none of them classics, but learned deeply from all the same; a childhood dream remembered for years. All of these things feed into my life’s one great achievement: to be able to say that I am all of these things but I am also all of the things I would have been had I but the time. And then, with a wink, to wave that opportunity, and its burdens, on to you, the living.