To the degree we can embrace our mortality rather than deny it, we can live that much more completely and joyfully.

- Dean Ornish, MD

Some time has passed since my Year to Live project came to an end, but my interest in reflecting on death as a way of truly living continues on.  I’m happy to recommend a book called Enjoy Every Sandwich to anyone else who isn’t afraid of the conversation!

A quick read, Enjoy Every Sandwich is a spiritual memoir written by Lee Lipsenthal, a young physician who learns he is dying of esophageal cancer.  It reads a lot like Tuesdays With Morrie, flowing with insight and the beauty of human connection.

Here are my main take-aways:

1)  Accepting uncertainty and relinquishing control

We all have some form of magical thinking when it comes to dying.  It’s how we attempt to gain control over our fears.  My particular brand of magical thinking is that if you eat well, exercise and meditate, you will most likely have a long and healthy life.  I know this is not entirely rational, and Lee himself is my myth-basher.

Lee is only 52 when he learns he has a 90% chance of dying in five years, and that it won’t be an easy or painless death.  As the director of Dean Ornish’s Preventative Medicine Research Institute, eating well, yoga, meditation and exercise are an essential part of Lee’s profession and his lifestyle.  He teaches thousands of patients struggling with disease to overcome their fears of pain and death and to embrace a more joyful way of living.  And yet he still dies.  (He died on Sept. 20, 2011.)

Am I going to stop being a vegetarian or give up doing laps at the pool?  No, but I should do these things because the are in line with my values and make me feel good here and now — not because I think they are really going to hold the final say when it comes to my mortality.

2)  Living a life of gratitude (and showing it!)

Lee calls gratitude “a small practice with a big payoff.”  One of the things that keeps Lee from getting bent out of shape about dying is that he’s incredibly appreciative of the life he’s already had.  He’s happily married, he obviously loves his two children and is enormously proud of them, he’s had the career of his dreams, he’s well-traveled and lives in a beautiful place.

Every day for the past 20 years, he thought and jotted down the things that he was grateful for.  To him, the gratitude practice led to a new understanding of the Native American expression that “today should be a good day to die.”

My take – it’s not just about giving thanks for 2 or 3 things every day, but also about showing it!  Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times wrote this Sunday    that showing affection to young children lessons the “toxic stress” they carry with them into their adult lives – a stress that 20 years of scientific research proves is linked to a life of crime and poverty.  Give the gift of hugs and undivided attention to the people in your life, young and old!

3)  Being open to something out there bigger than this life

This might be the hardest piece for me to grasp, coming from a science-oriented family that has demanded empirical evidence to explain just about everything in the world.

Lee writes about a couple of out-of-the box experiences that cause him to connect with the “bigness of the universe.”  One involves a past life experience; others involve uncanny premonitions.  At first, Lee is as freaked out by these moments as any of us would be.

He writes about the “God Spot,” a region of the brain (technically the right angular gyrus and posterior right temporal region) that is triggered by stimuli like prayer, sensory deprivation, starvation and psychoactive drugs such as mushrooms used in shamanic journeys.  It doesn’t matter whether the God Spot was put there by a higher power or developed physiologically as a result of body chemistry and experience — the effect on our lives and behaviors is the same.

As a generous gift at the end of my Year to Live journey, a friend with years of training offered me an astrological consultation “rooted in open-mindedness.”  Since I was open to pretty much anything that year, and since I trust this guy inherently (he’s really not woo-woo, though he always struck me as somehow tapped into the wider understanding of why things unfold the way they do), I accepted.  What happened in our hour and a half over the phone profoundly opened my mind and showed me that our paths to fulfillment are nonlinear and not necessarily under our control.  I gave myself more permission to let things evolve organically, and I was extremely grateful.  (You can learn more about his work here.)

I’ll leave you with a short passage from Enjoy Every Sandwich:

In my old reality, you grow up, you have kids, you become a doctor, you practice medicine until you are too old and feeble to continue, you retire, and then you die.  Any time any of this becomes uncomfortable, you suck it up and move on.

In my new reality, past lives are possible, death may be a stop along the way, meditation is essential, and love is the juice that fuels it all.  There’s room enough for many emotions, thoughts, and beliefs, and it’s all part of my human experience….

Fearing the unknown seems like a waste of time and energy.  Knowing this may not be our last sandwich helps us not to regret that with each bite the sandwich slowly disappears.

Carry on, friends!

The amazing baby shower!

Hello, dear readers of Last Year to Live.

This month marks a year since my one year to live project came to an end.  And a year since my close childhood friend Marisa died of metastatic breast cancer.

I continue to be grateful for everyone who came along with me on this writing journey and for all of the comments – some on the blog, but many more off-line – that kept me inspired throughout that year.  The number one lesson I learned is that engaging in the topic of death unequivocally made me live life more fully.

I have some good news to share!  I’ve just come back from Marisa’s brother & sister-in-law’s baby shower.  Marisa would have been an amazing aunt to this little one, and I like to imagine her smiling at all of us.   The holidays will be a little easier this year.

On my end, because I’ve been missing the brightness of life lived through the lens of writing, I’ve launched a new blog called Beyond Siri’s Grasp.  I hope you’ll sign up for new posts by email or RSS on the top left side of the new blog.  (Unfortunately I can’t transfer your email over automatically, but if you’d prefer, send me an okay and I’ll enter it by hand for you.)

I look forward to seeing you there!

(If you are coming to this Year to Live blog for the first time, consider reading through it in chronological order, starting with the post on February 10, 2010.)

Thank you for reading!

All my best,

Barbara

For nearly one year, a small group of us met each month at the Village Zendo in New York to discuss mortality and to think constructively about how we might go about living our lives if we truly had just one year to live.

I documented my thoughts throughout the year in this blog.  What I did not write about was the all-too-real end-of-life journey of my earliest childhood friend Marisa, who was courageously facing metastatic cancer while I went about my hypothetical journey.

On the night of November 17, our class did a “dissolution of the body” meditation — a guided exercise used by Tibetan lamas to prepare people for the journey of death and beyond.   I’d be pretty hard-pressed to tell you what it was like because right at the point when our teacher said, “Resist the temptation to fall asleep,” I fell promptly asleep.

But that’s not the important thing.  Five days later, Marisa passed away.

In my grayest moments, I’ve dismissed my own year to live process as frivolous because I am, as much as any of us can claim, healthy.

Then I remember the last time I visited Marisa.  We laughed about the silly details of our childhoods together, like how we let our brothers con us into racing their dirt bikes off a ramp, flying through the air over us (a la Evel Knievel) while we lay completely flat on the asphalt.  And the great trips our families took together involving rented beach shacks and RV trailers.

“It’s hard to come up with a memory from childhood that doesn’t include you guys,” she smiled.

With a lot of hard-earned wisdom under her belt, Marisa posted on Facebook in June: “9 years ago I was diagnosed with breast cancer.  I’ve seen my share of ups and downs over the years but I seem to only really remember the ups.  The downs will come and go – no reason to get stuck on them.  But the ups, those are the memories you keep forever.”

Of course, “forever” is a relative term.  Marisa’s ups are now my ups.  And maybe someday my own children will remember parts of the stories and her ups will be theirs.  But eventually it all fades into some ethereal mystery.

Still, I like her view of things — if we can put the things we’re grateful for into some kind of internal treasure box to look back upon sometimes (all things in moderation, of course), we’d probably be doing ourselves a world of good.

I can imagine that burying a child of any age has to be the most painful act of all.  I’ve heard many people question faith and god in these circumstances.  Allow me to share a passage from one of the best books on dying I read all year (and believe me, I read my fair share of them!).

“Here If You Need Me” by Kate Braestrup is the autobiography of the chaplain for the Maine game warden who herself was widowed with four young children when her husband – a state trooper – was killed in a car accident.  I’ve read and re-read this passage many times:

My children asked me, “Why did Dad die?”

I told them, “It was an accident.  There are small accidents, like knocking over your milk at the dinner table.  And there are large accidents, like the one your dad was in.  No one meant it to happen.  It just happened.  And his body was too badly damaged in the accident for his soul to stay in it anymore, and so he died.

“God does not spill milk.  God did not bash the truck into your father’s car.  Nowhere in the scripture does it say, ‘God is car accident’ or ‘God is death.’  God is justice and kindness, mercy, and always – always – love.  So if you want to know where God is in this or in anything, look for love.”

I’ve been looking for love everywhere.  I saw it in my fellow classmates and our teachers at the Zendo this year.  I saw it in heartfelt comments on this blog.   I saw it played out in my own family.  I saw it in the acts of complete strangers on our trip overseas.  I saw it in the hugs and stories shared at Marisa’s funeral.

I’ve got a year’s worth of learnings, sayings and little nuggets I could end with.  I think, though, I’m going to leave it with this.  If you find wisdom in it, please use it to inform your own journey.  And please keep me posted!

Every day in Zen temples around the world, the following verse marks the close of the day’s ceremonies:

“Let me respectfully remind you, life and death are of supreme importance.  Time passes swiftly and opportunity is lost.  Each of us must strive to awaken.  Awaken!  Take heed, do not squander your lives.“

May our paths cross again soon,

Barbara

photo by D Sharon Pruitt

Friends,

Unbelievably, I’ve arrived at the end of the Year to Live project.  While I had originally thought our final class would take place in January 2011 – 364 days from when we started — it will draw to a close this Wednesday evening instead.

(Our teachers harbored no secret agenda in ending the class early.  No not-too-subtle message about the unpredictability of it all.  It was truly just a scheduling issue.)

I’ve learned from others that the “dissolution of the body” meditation which symbolically ends the class is a powerful one.  Frankly, I’m scared of it.  One person I know who experienced it said that this exercise is so visceral that he actually lost control of some, ah, bodily function when he did it.  So – yes – there are many reasons to be resisting all of this!

Someone asked our teacher, a hospice chaplain, about the main regrets people share on their death beds.  Number one, our teacher answered, is that they wish they’d said “I love you” more often.  Number two is that they wish they’d taken more vacation.  That’s it.  We’re pretty simple creatures when it comes right down to it.

In homage to love and appreciation of the journey, I’d like to share a passage I’ve been thinking about over and over again for the past several weeks.  It’s from the book “About Alice” by Calvin Trillin honoring his late wife:

Once, for the program at the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp [a camp for children with cancer and blood diseases] gala, some volunteer counselors contributed short passages about their experiences at camp, and Alice wrote about one of the campers, a sunny little girl she called L.

At camp, Alice had a tendency to gravitate toward the child who needed the most help, and L. was one of those.

“Last summer, the camper I got closest to, L., was a magical child who was severely disabled,” Alice wrote.  “She had two genetic diseases, one which kept her from growing and one which kept her from digesting any food.  She had to be fed through a tube at night and she had so much difficulty walking that I drove her around in a golf cart a lot.  We both liked that.”

“One day, when we were playing duck-duck-goose, I was sitting behind her and she asked me to hold her mail for her while she took her turn to be chased around the circle.  It took her a while to make the circuit, and I had time to see that on top of the pile was a note from her mom.  Then I did something truly awful, which I’m reluctant now to reveal.  I decided to read the note.  I simply had to know what this child’s parents could have done to make her so spectacular, to make her the most optimistic, most enthusiastic, most hopeful human being I had ever encountered.”

“I snuck a quick look at the note, and my eyes fell on the sentence: ‘If God had given us all of the children in the world to choose from, L., we would only have chosen you.’”

“Before L. got back to her place in the circle, I showed the note to Bud, who was sitting next to me. ‘ Quick. Read this,’ I whispered.  ‘It’s the secret of life.’”

Let me thank you all, once again, for sticking with me throughout!

While this may sound sinister or downright peculiar, let me assure you that Felix, as he’s known, holds a cherished position in our household.  For starters, he’s a silent but reliable teacher and a master at imparting lessons of impermanence.

Here’s a short essay I wrote about this, which was published on Salon.com today.

http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2010/10/30/skeleton_in_my_family

Some of the Salon readers suggest we should give him a proper burial.  Others think that as long as he fulfills the role of a teacher, it’s OK to keep him above ground.  I’d love to hear your thoughts…

Atul Gawande

Two weeks ago some of my closest friends from college were in New York for our annual gathering, a tradition we began nine years earlier.  The amazing thing about my friends is that they’re game for almost anything, which is how we found ourselves on a beautiful Saturday morning inside a massive auditorium listening to a lecture entitled “How to Live When You Have to Die” by the physician and author Atul Gawande.

Atul Gawande is the new American “Dr. Death.”  I mean that in the most optimistic of ways.  While Jack Kevorkian made headlines for championing a terminal patient’s right to die via physician-assisted suicide, Gawande is “instinctively against” Oregon and Washington’s assisted suicide laws, which he fears may lead to a mistrust of doctors.  Gawande’s focus is on exploring end-of-life care, including ways in which terminally ill and their families come to grips with death .

He opened the lecture by talking about the phone call he received from his wife’s cousin, whose 12-year-old daughter had Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a disease that is 85% treatable.    Unfortunately, the treatments weren’t working for this little girl, who was emaciated and so ill that she hadn’t been able to see friends for over a year.  The cousin wanted to know if they should try the last recourse of treatment — a bone marrow transplant that had a slim margin of success.

Atul Gawande found himself “utterly useless” in this conversation.  Years of medical training had taught him to say that there’s always something more we can do.  But how to weigh one more radical treatment against the suffering of a loved one?

That question lead him on a journey.  If you get the chance you should read his latest piece in the New Yorker:   “Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?”

The real take-away from Gawande’s latest work is this — patients benefit most by having someone to talk to about death.  In his article he states that “… people who had substantive discussions with their doctor about their end-of-life preferences were far more likely to die at peace and in control of their situation, and to spare their family anguish.”

Above all, there are 4 simple questions to talk through with those who are ill:

1)    What do you understand to be your prognosis?

2)    What fears do you have about what’s to come?

3)   What are your goals as time grows shorter?

4)    How much suffering are you willing to go through for the possible trade-off of added time?

One person he talked to said her ailing father thought through these questions and concluded that he’d still want to live if he could eat ice cream and watch football on TV. It was the benchmark she used in deciding upon all medical interventions until the day his condition no longer allowed for these simple pleasures.   Gawande reports that a conversation based on these four questions with his own father was “incredibly hard but completely transformational.”

Of course, the premise of the Year to Live class I’ve been taking is that it’s never too early to have these conversations about death with ourselves and with our loved ones.  Some day we won’t get life’s winning lottery ticket, as Gawande would say.  And having thought about death would hopefully have meant that we used the time we had being as committed to life as possible.

So what happened to the 12-year-old daughter in Gawande’s family?

Her family took her home from the hospital and stopped all but palliative treatments.  Ten days later he got the email sent to close relatives and friends saying that she had passed away.

“All is well,” the message read.  “Our home is full of peace.”

In the days before our class, I found myself going through all of my possessions, clutching photos of friends and places, wishing the teacher had asked for 10 things instead of 5.  But being the ever-dutiful student, here’s what I came up with:

• A photograph of my family — including my children, my parents, an aunt who is like a second mother to me, and my nieces and nephews.  It had been a perfect evening by the bay.  Everyone was healthy, and we were almost giddy about being together.

• A photograph taken by my father-in-law of a lone apple tree which stands on their windswept property in upstate NY.  I love this gnarled tree.  The trunk is absolutely hollow, yet it supports the most incredible foliage and fruit season after season.  The photo represents a profound appreciation of nature, as well as resilience and abundance.

• A piece of drift wood taken from the enormous message Dave left for me on the beach one morning years ago in drift wood, sea shells and pine cones:  “Barbara, will you marry me?”

• A small clay Buddha made by one of my sons while we were on a family retreat at the Insight Meditation Society.  It symbolizes the gifts of contemplation, compassion and community that I’ve found through studying mindfulness.

• A necklace made by desert women in North Africa.  It was given to me by a human rights activist I worked with who became a true friend.  A year ago she nearly died on a hunger strike, and I learned much about what it means to take a stand for what you believe in.  The necklace represents my work, which is fulfilling and gratifying (most of the time!) because of people like her.

On the evening of our class, we set up our small altars side by side.  I was blown away by the power of what everyone brought:  photos, baby clothing, journals, sheets of music, cherished jewelry, an onion, a note from a lover before she died.  All of it symbolizing the significance of our lives and the broader web that links us with the people and places around us.

Then came the twist. . . we were going to do a walking meditation around all of the altars, and each time we walked around we were to take one of someone else’s objects and put it under a cloth on the adjacent table.

Wait – did I hear that right?  We were going to take one of these life treasures away from someone?  And others were going to take away mine?  Yes – that was the exercise.

I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through.  The objects themselves I can live without.  But what they represent, I cannot.  If the very idea of the exercise was that painful to me, how could I inflict it on others by gathering up their things?

So we began the walking.  And the taking.  And the being taken from.  First the photograph of the apple tree vanished.  On the next rotation, the drift wood was gone, then the necklace, then the Buddha.  I also picked up objects from others and placed them as carefully as I could under the cloth.  I could hear some of my classmates quieting tears.  Mainly, I was focused on the photo of my family.  I nearly pleaded, “OK – I get the point.  Let’s just stop the whole thing here.”  In the next rotation, the picture of my family was gone.  Then the very cloth that represented the altar was gone.  I was gone.

There may be an element of  ‘you just had to be there’ to this.  But I can tell you that the experience felt like death itself.  It shook me to my core, revealed all of my attachments, and demonstrated viscerally the lesson of impermanence.  Up until that moment, I thought I was handling all of this study of death pretty well.  Now I see that I had been holding it at arm’s length, dealing with it intellectually and in words.

There’s been much for me to reflect on as a result of that class, and the lessons don’t come easily to conclusion.  But in the meditation that immediately followed the disappearance of our altars, I felt inexplicably hopeful and light.  It was as if a source of great worry had been lifted.   I wasn’t at all sure what it meant, but it seemed like a net good and I’m going to go with that.

I’d love to hear what 5 objects are most meaningful to you…

Angel Orensanz Synagogue, Lower East Side

Dearest Friends,

For nearly two months now, I’ve completely neglected my Year to Live project.  Dead silence on my part.  I got so out of the habit of writing this blog that I had to root through piles of paper to even find the password to log in.

I feel like I owe you an explanation. . .  I was just out there in the world, living ferociously.

In that time  I indulged my wanderlust and set off for the mountains and any body of water I could find.  I hiked in an old growth forest in Oregon with one of my closest friends, her daughter and my littlest guy.  We rafted down a river in the high desert and slipped our bodies into soothing natural hot springs.    I skipped rocks on a glass-surfaced lake in Maine with my husband, ate wild blueberries on a trail in the White Mountains, was chased by a flock of migrating shorebirds on a protected island off Massachusetts, and strained to see a whale (a whale!) off the coast of New Jersey.

I think the complete surrender into what I value most in life was exactly what I needed after thinking about mortality so deeply month after month.

But here’s the thing:  there came a time when I longed to be grounded once again in the reality of my everyday life.  The familiar messiness. These very piles of paper.  My work.  The cacophony of street noises on my New York block.  The personalities that drive me to distraction.

I came to remember that there truly is a season for everything.  That it was time to bid farewell to a memorable summer and to greet whatever life has in store for me this fall.

Which brings me to Yom Kippur.  Today is the holiest of days in the Jewish calendar.  For twenty years, I’ve been observing this holiday in solidarity with my husband.  What I didn’t recognize until someone in my Year to Live class pointed it out, is that one interpretation of the day is that it is a “rehearsal for death.”  My classmate  Diane said – crediting Rabbi Shefa Gold also:

Yom Kippur is a day when Jews fast from food and drink, from sex, from anointing themselves, from washing, and wearing leather – all as a way to detach ourselves from the physical body and to have the experience of the nakedness of our existence.  Many Jews wear a “kittel” a full length, white garment which is the dress (shroud) that many Jews are buried in.

During the entire period, we act as if this day were our last, “our only day to face the Truth, forgive ourselves and each other, remember who we are and why we were born.  Yom Kippur reminds us that we are all dying.  There is no time for regret, worry, fear, no time to put off facing the truth, or to delay thanking our beloveds.”  Each moment takes on an urgency, and like each encounter with death we are urged into the fullness of living.

It is not morbid however because it is predicated on the hope of the New Year and the opportunity to live life to its fullest.  It is a day of death so that there can be a new life.

Last night, as a single violin resonated Kol Nidre throughout our historic synagogue, candles flickering from every hanging chandelier and – improbably – a striking long-haired cat wandering around the altar, I gave thanks to the universe for the life I’ve been so lucky to lead and vowed to try not to take it for granted.  I silently rededicated myself to bringing awareness to my deeds and to living with compassion for others and for myself.

An important part of this past year has been writing to all of you, and I do hope you’ll continue to join me in this journey.  Echoing the words of my classmate, I wish you all a good and sweet year and a year of insight,  loving-kindness and peace.

All my very best,

Barbara

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, a time to reap that which is planted

A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance

A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing

A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away

A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak

A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.

From the start, I’ve wondered whether I’d be able to trick myself into living with a greater sense of meaning by imagining that life wasn’t going to stretch on forever.  It seems too trite to mention that death is the common destiny of every person on this planet.  But, oh, the fog we’ll conjure up to protect ourselves from clearly seeing this certain eventuality.

In practical terms, the mere mention of the Year to Live class I’m taking at the Village Zendo in New York, or the book that started Year to Live groups meeting in living rooms across the country, or even this blog made me feel like a skunk at a garden party.  Publicly, no one wants to talk about death.

Yet many mornings since I’ve begun this blog, I’d find a message in my email from a friend or a complete stranger saying that someone close to them had died.  Or they had recently received bad news about their health.  Or they were somehow also just predisposed to think along these lines.

Slowly, these conversations got us thinking more deeply and honestly about our lives.  Some shared poems.  One friend even sweetly offered to officiate at a ceremony at the end of this process.  (Who knows, I may even take her up on it!)  I cherish this new-found community.

Six months to live.  The very sound of it makes my heart beat a little faster, makes me feel like I’d better have something pretty profound to say to mark the occasion.  “Time flies” and “Carpe Diem” are just not up to muster.

But what is a valid way to mark this occasion? I discovered that in my usual life, constantly working towards some future fulfillment, I’d been losing sight of what is immediately present.  What has made this project so tough has been putting the “small”  intangibles that really matter into words.

Take this recent experience as an example…

Last month on a rainy London evening, I left the Globe Theatre with a close friend from Spain who I rarely get to see in person.  There was nary a restaurant open, so we wandered along the Thames arm in arm under one of those crazy umbrellas that’s meant to withstand high winds, where the front is short and back is long, but turned sideways, it holds two friends perfectly.  We talked about everything from work and what it means to contribute to the world, to the damnedest things our kids say, to  how we’ll know for certain when we’ve hit middle age.  For hours we laughed so hard we shook and ignored all of the social niceties reserved for less-close friendships that warn, “You better not say that out loud!”

This month, the same friend put her 12-year-old son on a plane bound for our home in NY.  I’ve known him since he was a baby — she was my first friend to have a child — and we spent many evenings after work taking him along with us to grown up things like art shows and nice restaurants.  That time together had taken away some of the fear I carried which equated having children with losing my sense of self.

So there I was, picking him up at the airport as an unaccompanied minor.  My sons were with me.  Drew presented him with a box of Fig Newtons and a huge hug.  We took him by subway to Chinatown, where he gazed at the decidedly strange things sold from barrels outside the apothecaries and fish shops.  Afterwords, he and Evan played chicken on the monkey bars at the park, the blond peach fuzz on their legs standing out against their bronzed skin.

The next day in the car, driving to Maine to bring them to summer camp, they fell comfortably into talk about the World Cup.   They played a tickle game.  Drew was laughing harder than we’d ever heard him laugh.   He put his head on his new friend’s shoulder and fell asleep.  Evan was endlessly happy that he had someone with him at camp this year to ward off the inevitable first days of homesickness.  When the woman at the Friendly’s where we stopped to use the bathroom asked if they’re my 3 sons,  I smiled saying, “Yes, for today.”

What I mean to say is that perhaps these small moments are what truly make up our legacies.  My warm relationship with a friend flows into a connection between our children, across a vast ocean.  Maybe they will continue to be friends, introducing their own children in the future.  Or maybe they won’t.   In the life that’s important, things don’t need to be so linear.

The poet Natalie Goldberg once said that writers get to live twice.  They  go about their regular lives, but then there’s a second chance where they look closely at the texture and the details.  I’m so grateful to all of you, dear readers, for traveling with me on this journey and for encouraging me to note the small things.  I look forward to sharing the next six months together.

Creative Commons

One of the recent assignments in our Year to Live class was to do a “life review,” and the instructions began something like this:

Sit quietly for a while and bring to mind someone from your past whose kindness touched your heart.

Envision yourself speaking to that person.  Tell them what they have meant to you.

In general, I’m a fan of any exercise that offers the chance of meaningful reflection.  Somehow, though, the process of envisioning myself speaking with people who are very much alive seemed utterly ridiculous.  Why not actually talk to them?  Which is how I found myself on a mission to find my favorite high school teacher from 25 years ago.

Unfortunately, Dr. Montella (for she was one of those rare public high school English teachers with a PhD in the topic) had no discernible presence on the Internet.  A call to the high school led to another dead-end when the receptionist told me that it was against school policy to give out contact information for retired teachers, nor would she be able to tell Dr. Montella that I was looking for her.  I tried the phone book but found no trace of her.

Finally I thought of my sister-in-law’s mother, who taught typing in the high school years back and seems to know just about everyone in the state of New Jersey.

“Yes,” she said.  “I know exactly where she is.  My husband takes yoga with her every week.”

I began to worry if Dr. Montella would have any memory of me.  She must have encountered hundreds upon hundreds of students over the years, and the only thing that might have stood out as a memory of me was that I had won some state writing contest while I was in her class for a literary analysis of the 15^th century morality play Everyman, and she had taken me to the award ceremony.  (My own memory of that event was noting how weird it felt to be sitting in my teacher’s car!)

A few weeks passed before this somewhat complicated web of relationships yielded a response.  Dr. Montella certainly remembered who I was, and she would be delighted to hear from me.

I called her immediately, and we did a quick catch-up.  She was exactly as I remembered – no-nonsense, interesting and interested.

“If it seems like I’m writing down what you tell me,” she said, “it’s because I am.”

I wanted to ask if she might like to have lunch someday.  I felt nervous and 17 again.  Thankfully she beat me to it.  That’s how I came to be seated in the dining room of her orderly, yet cheerful, northern NJ condo this week.

For 3 ½ hours we talked like old friends.  She wanted to know about Dave and the children and what I had done with my career.  (“Ghostwriting [part of my work these days] seems so unfair,” she said.  “I understand the function, but really you should think about getting your name on things,” she observed, ever the supportive teacher.)

Much had happened in her life as well.   The momentous news was that her beloved husband had passed away.  After fifty years, it was an adjustment to live without him, though she seems to have dealt with this life-change without a hint of “why me.”  She volunteers at the local hospital, goes on trips with Elderhostel, belongs to a book club, and sings in a choir.  Through it all, fond memories of Tom sustain her.

Which led me to what I really wanted to tell her.

“You gave all of us such valuable skills,” I began.  “But the most important thing you did for me happened the day you put down the text you were teaching, looked around the room, and said, ‘Here’s a bit of advice for your own life when the time comes:  Be sure to marry your best friend.’”

I told her how much those words meant to me.  How I had judged all of my relationships by that measure.  How looking for my best friend had led me on a circuitous but definitive path to Dave.

“Funny,” she said.  “I don’t remember saying that, but I certainly agree with the sentiment.”

We lingered over tea until it was time for both of us to continue on with the tasks of the day.  Getting up to leave, she reached out her arms and thanked me for coming.

******

Right after I wrote this, Dave send me this article from the New York Times about people finding their teachers years later through FaceBook.   I highly recommend trying it yourself.  And if your teacher hasn’t joined the FB revolution, going the extra distance to find him/her might yield benefits to you both!