Do you believe the Universe conspires? I’m not talking about the “Everything Happens For a Reason” nonsense. I’m talking about things unfolding in your life as if it was pre-ordained, pre-destined to happen. Prescribed, unavoidable Fate.
In 2017, three months before my 40th birthday, I was struck by a bolt of lightning. Figuratively, of course. A fully formed idea woke me from a dead sleep at 3am. I will start a business: care packages specially designed to help kids grieve. I would use my expertise as a child psychologist to help kids through loss and tough change, like the death of a family member, or the cancer of a parent.
And I did it. I was off and running, sending boxes to kids enduring hard times all over the country. The launch dovetailed perfectly with my 40thbirthday. With so much to celebrate, I made big plans for a blowout dance party, which delighted our three young children who were eager to don their fancy clothes and boogie with mom and dad.
But when my 40th birthday arrived three months later, I wasn’t on the dance floor. Instead, I was stunned to find myself in a barber’s chair in the back room of a hair salon while a solemn stranger shaved my head bald. My life had just been completely upended by three words I had never expected to hear: you have cancer.
Oh, the irony. I had been devoted to helping anonymous children but now had to face my own: ages 6, 4, and 2 – and break the news that they were about to endure hardship, the likes of which none of us had ever seen. Mama would need a double mastectomy and a year of chemotherapy. In those earliest days, we weren’t even sure I would survive it.
I had no inkling when I launched three months earlier that my kids might need to receive a box. But you see, that’s the thing about death. When we think of it, if we think of it at all, we always think about it happening to other people. Death is what happens to other people.
When you get a cancer diagnosis, though, you suddenly get smacked in the face with an unpleasant thought: death could happen to me.
And then you go for the first time and sit in the waiting room of the cancer ward decorated with posters from a high school service project- you can do it! Keep fighting! And you realize they are for you. As you get chemotherapy each week, you surreptitiously survey the room of tragically ill fellow patients-- and you do some sick actuarial math and wonder how many of these people will survive this? You hold the hand of your friend, who was diagnosed at the same time as you, who will be dead in a week, leaving behind a nine year old son.
You look into the faces of your precious children as you tuck them in at night and they look back at you, bald and bloated and pale and exhausted from the chemotherapy and they wonder aloud, “Mama, are you going to die?” And you don’t know what to say, because the only thing worse than a dead mother is a lying dead mother.
You get clubbed in the head over and over again with the most repellent thought: death might very well happen to me.
But then you have to laugh hysterically, in the truest sense of the word hysterical: with wildly uncontrolled emotion. Because OF COURSE death will happen to me: it is basically the only thing in this godforsaken world I can count on with utter and complete certainty.
Did Fate conspire to hit me with the lightning bolt of my business idea because she knew I needed to prepare early for my death? So I could begin the work now of helping my kids deal with grief? I didn’t know, (I still don’t know) but I wanted to make sure Fate knew I got the message.
So I read lots of books about death. I revisited the research about what grieving kids need. I picked my funeral director and met with him in his parlor to discuss my wishes, in the presence of a man laid out in a casket. I threw a kids party to do a dry run of decorating my coffin. (No, they didn’t know what the box was for and yes, it turned out fabulous). I did all of this with my children at the center of my plans: to help them grieve when I die. To be able to show them what it means to die with intention. To face death as a fact of life instead of a lost battle. By the time we realized that it was unlikely that my cancer would kill me anytime soon, my three young kids could tell you with certainty and ease: all living things die. As if they’re talking about the weather.
It just is. Of course, when their mother dies, especially if it is too soon, it will be devastating, and no amount of preparation can change that.
Now I am two years cancer-free, but I’m still not counting on avoiding my Fate. I will die, maybe too soon. But the gift of my cancer is this: I no longer walk around with the idea that death is what happens to other people, or that I am somehow owed a long and happy life. The deep awareness that my life is not promised to me is like a diamond I carry with me, every single day, forevermore.
A little fear diamond.
When I hold that fear diamond in the palm of my hand, I have a presence in the moment; a sense of gratitude and celebration. I recognize how lucky I am to get to have these moments with my children and my husband.
What if you, instead of counting on entitlement to live until you’re old and ready, or a nebulous belief that death is what happens to other people, exchanged that bill of goods for your own fear diamond?
Maybe Fate is conspiring for you- right at this very moment- to hear the stories you are hearing tonight.
Because guess what? We are all going to die, many of us too soon.
There’s a free fear diamond from me to you- hold it tight in your hand, and let it remind you to be present, grateful and celebratory. Because if you’re reading this, have the unpromised, uninsured gift of life.
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