COVID-19 has me thinking about mortality. I’m constantly worried about my parents. Then I worry about my husband. Then me. Or rather, in the worry about me, I worry about my kids. Leaving them to grow up without a mother. Then I worry about my kids. That this horrible thing could strike one of them.
It’s a strange time to feel like death is a monster lurking on every surface, every particle of air, and yet… probably not likely? Maybe?
It’s impossible not to think about loss. And how quickly it could come. Five days from the first cough, even.
And it’s impossible not to think of the impact my own death would have on my children. I’m 47. My children are ten, eight and seven. They’re babies. And yet children younger than they have lost their mothers. It may be unthinkable, but it’s not impossible.
How I Put My Life Lessons to Good Use?
So when the unthinkable enters my mind, I panic. Stuffed with advice and guidance I have yet to give. Like Amy Dickinson in the final leg of the drive to dropping off her daughter for her freshman year of college:
I had reserved the long drive to Virginia for the conveyance of a thoughtful lecture series I intended to deliver to my daughter with talks on such topics as “Your Body and You,” “The Hidden Menace of Credit Card Debt,” “Roommates: The Good, the Bad and the Bipolar,” and “The Temptation of On-Campus ROTC Recruiters.” …Two hours from campus, feeling our time was running out, I said to her, “There’s so much I want to tell you. I feel like I need to tell you important things about life.”
Amy Dickinson, The Mighty Queens of Freeville
Like Amy, I have all these themes. All these titles for my future “Letters to My Children” book written down in notebooks. And sometimes the thoughts make their way into actual letters or essays. Usually, they remain on my eternal “someday” shelf.
Advice can be tricky. You just never know what path people are going to need to walk, and the advice you needed might not be what they need. This needs to be about what I learned for myself. What I know to be true, and what I want to say is a good place to start.
I’m in that space between urgency and panic where there’s a little bit of adrenaline forcing some action, but not the focused effort of survival. This is a good time to just put it out there.
My Quick & Dirty Ethical Will for My Young Kids.
What I want you to know about now and about later.
- I will do everything I can with my mind and body to fight to stay alive to be with you. But if I die anyway, when you find out, it will be terrible. Everything you will feel and do will be completely normal and natural. Your life will be different. No one will know how to make things normal again.
- It is not God’s fault. God is your greatest friend right now and always. Pray to God which means talk to God. Ask God to give you strength to get through this. Ask God to help you get through it. You always have God within you and He will never leave your side or let you down. Listen for His whispers. They are the thoughts that alight on your mind that comfort you and guide you to peace and strength. He is always talking to you. God isn’t a magician or a genie who does cheap tricks. God is You and You are God. He is the wellspring of everything you need and He lives in your heart, body and mind. He is with you always, every moment of every day of your life.
- Know that I love you. Your mom loves you. In life and death. And nothing you could ever do would ever take away how much I love you. You were the greatest gift of my life. And just because I was disorganized a lot of the time and overwhelmed sometimes never meant you were the cause. You are my favorite and greatest things I ever knew.
- Be kind to yourself. This almost always means being kind to others. You’ll never regret not saying a sarcastic remark or making yourself sound smarter. The true regret that eats you up is when you lose your cool and say something you don’t really mean. If you ever do this, say you’re sorry.
- It’s important to say you’re sorry.
- Do what you really want to do from the very beginning. Don’t wait until you’ve paid your dues. Don’t wait for a second career. If you want to be an artist, you go be an artist right from the start. If you want to be a gardener, or an actor or a lawyer? Do it. Right from the start. There is a place and a need for your exact way of doing all of those things in the world. You don’t have to look a certain way or have a certain personality. You go do what you want just as you are.
- It’s okay to laugh. To be happy. To love people. It’s okay to be sad. But it is okay and wonderful if you forget you miss me or forget you’re sad and you open your heart to the wonderful bright sun of joy, too.
- Try to save some money early on. The more, the better. Because as your saved money grows, so will your sense of security and the exciting feeling of opportunity. If you save your money, you’ll be able to spend it on something wonderful when you want it. A dream. Property, time, a business idea, a gift.
- Addiction is not your friend. Addiction is a prison.
- You are enough. Complete. Full. Right now. You don’t have to be famous, or rich, or popular. You don’t have to be married or have kids or live up to what you think someone else expects of you. You don’t have to earn any kind of status in the world of tumble into the trap of comparisons in order to fulfill the contract you were sent to fulfill. YOU are enough. The things you do are choices you make as to how you want to spend your time. there will always be trade-offs. Live the way you want to live.
It’s a Living Document
It’s a draft. Or maybe it’ll end up being The One.
The point is, in less than an hour, there’s some sort of peace within me now where there was anxiety before.
Yeah, I can make it better. I can elaborate. I can take some of it out. But it’s fine.
What about you? You don’t have to go through some big process. You don’t even have to “get centered” before you start. Death is walking around the streets right now. It’s bagging our groceries and opening our door for us. It is more present on the mind of our society than perhaps ever before.
Your Perfectly Quick & Dirty Ethical Will in One Hour or Less
Is there anything you want to say about your life?
Grab your laptop or some paper and a pen. Just to see what you happen to come up with, jot down your thoughts on these questions. They might change later. For now, you’re just going to set the timer for one hour – or ten minutes – and just answer without even hardly thinking.
Maybe some of them. Maybe all. Just jot down a few sentences. Or phrases.
You might want to make an informal list like I did. Or yours might be a letter. Just know it’s a draft. You can scratch out words, add things in the margins, save to re-write “neater” on another day.
Some questions to start with:
- Choose one person (or equal group such as “children” or “parents”) to address. Only one.
- What’s do you want them to know the moment they find out you died?
- If you could be or assign them a guardian angel, how would you most want to guide and protect them?
- What area(s) of your life did you struggle with? Or maybe it just didn’t go as “automatically” as you thought it would or should.
- What area(s) of your life gave you the most peace and meaning?
- Is there anything you were you wrong about? What fell away as just not important at all when it came down to it?
- What were you right about? Maybe it didn’t make sense to others, but you just knew. And you were right.
- Do they need to be forgiven for anything they’ve said or done? Do you need to be forgiven or to express that you’re sorry for anything you’ve said or done?
- What do you hope you’ve meant to them?
- What has their presence in your life meant to you?
Fold it up and put it in an envelope in your sock drawer. Or stick that envelope in your safe under the basement stairs with your tax returns.
Then rest easy. You’ve done some really important, light-bearing work today.