Six Months To Live
This essay was written as part of Project 1,825 Things.
Once in my early twenties, I decided to pretend I only had six months to live. I don’t mean publicly. I never told a soul or said it aloud to anyone. I wanted to see what it would feel like to live that way, to remind myself of the exercise, as I was driving, say, one morning with my sunglasses on.
You only have six months to live—what are you going to do with yourself?
I was twenty-one. I was doing a lot of Buddhist meditation. I’d seen the book A Year To Live by the poet Stephen Levine, and figured I would try it. I’m not sure why I decided on six months instead of a year, but a year was a long time then, the way it is to children. Maybe I was impatient. You’re supposed to ask yourself, what would I do? How would I live, if I had just six months or a year, but wasn’t going to change anything major? Often all it meant was that I took off my sunglasses and looked around.
It was summer. I was working as a nanny, and the days were very long. We blew bubbles and did craft projects. Nothing very dramatic happened. Mostly I think I just paid attention. I made my art. I looked around. I went to dance classes and to the beach and held my face in the sunlight. I tried to wake up and taste the food I was eating and really be with the people I was being with.
When I remembered to be alive, it was sometimes like dancing, like some miracle of the body that I’ve never achieved with the body itself, a feeling of cliffs under bright sun and sea spray, or that place where the green of the trail meets the sand, where a spring runs down onto the beach, and where the water that has traveled however far it has traveled can finally, and like a poem, dissolve into the waves.
When I was a child I had a friend named Lily. She had dark hair and pale skin, and something about her reminded you of moonlight. We used to play for hours unsupervised behind her house in the tall green grass, and along the creek below that ran through town, ran all the way through all the towns, and then the hills, and finally to the ocean. In her patch of creek in the springtime we used to hunt for frogs. The tiny, light green frogs would hide there in the wet grass, the color of the grass itself, with only their movement to give them away. Some of them were smaller than our fingerprints.
You would think that we were eating them, how avidly we hunted for them in the bright green of the creekside. We just wanted to see them, to catch them and look at them, to put them in jars with some wood sorrel and a bit of water, as many as possible. We were monsters in our innocence, spurred on by fascination, enraptured by the very things that we no doubt terrified and harmed. Some of the frogs found their way into terrariums, but others—I don’t know. I can’t remember the point, just the hunt, and the cold clean water, and the grass. I remember what it did to me, for hours afterwards, my instincts sharpened, jumping at every shifting leaf on the sidewalk when we went into town to get ice cream after.
The idea with pretending you only have six months or a year to live is, of course, that you never know. The bus or the aneurysm or the heart attack—they can come at any time. Sometimes there’s a bad decision involved, those slippery stairs at night, or the friend who’s had a few drinks behind the wheel, but other times it’s nothing to do with you. You’re checking the soccer scores and then, the next moment, gone. As for my six month mortality experiment, it’s possible that I simply forgot about it, the way we always forget. I don’t remember marking the end, some metaphorical demise where I was grateful to be alive, or whatever. I would forget, and then remember, and take my sunglasses off, and then forget again.
To the frogs, I’m sure, we were the catastrophe. They were so small and soft and fascinating. Are they still there, I wonder? In the great warming and silencing and browning that is happening all around us, is there space, still, for those little green frogs?
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This is such a morbidly good idea and reminds me of the Stoics who say that we need to think about our deaths regularly. Also, your writing shines as usual.
I too remember the tiny green frogs of childhood.