Can You Resolve Not to Waste This Day?

Cancer, caftans, female friendship, and a reminder that everything about this life is urgent

Last Sunday, I stood at the bottom of the 40 Steps lookout in Newport, RI, turned my face to a burst of sun emerging from the clouds, closed my eyes, and prayed.

Seven of us were gathered in Newport to support our friend, K., and check off “New England girls weekend” from her cancer bucket list. Old friends (some of us going on 25+ years), together, we found ourselves trying to make sense of what is irrational and unsolvable — a prognosis we struggle to say aloud.

I have written about hard things before. I have written about bearing witness to others’ suffering. And, still, it doesn’t get easier. Whether it’s a spouse, a parent, or a friend who is akin to a sister, confronting our mortality requires exceptional courage and discomfort.

As with all hard things, there is a shameful instinct to turn our attention away. How very much I’d like to pretend that what’s happening with K., with current events, with the problems in my own community, isn’t happening. How easy it is to keep walking past the mother on the sidewalk, baby in her lap, hand outstretched. How easy it is to skip past the real news and linger on the celebrity gossip. How easy it is to scroll endlessly on our palm-sized hypnotists, instead of looking directly at the hard thing.

Anytime I’m not physically with K., it’s easy to indulge in the fantasy that her suffering isn’t happening. In her absence, I can pretend as if she gets days off from cancer, and that all the other elements in her tricky adult life (because all adult lives are tricky) are solid and ironclad because cancer is enough by itself. Who on earth should have to worry about bills and childcare and aging parents, too?

I entertain this fiction to avoid the unbearable truth — I cannot alleviate her suffering.

There are no good words for when life goes to shit. Many years ago, I found liberation in Kate Bowler’s work and the notion that language is incomplete in meeting these moments. Oftentimes, the best we can do is try not to put our feet too deep down our throats, and let the silence convey what words cannot: That we are here. We are sad. And the circumstances are both shitty and unfair.

So, that’s what we did in Newport. Mostly. We also dressed in caftans and wigs, threw ourselves a wine and cheese party, and reverted to the quirky teenage girls we once were. And when we weren’t sobbing in each other’s arms, we were laughing hysterically, stuffing ourselves with oysters, deciding which member of the original Vanderbilt family was the hottest, and getting impromptu tattoos from a salty New Englander named Captain Bret.

The thing about cancer, about mortality in general, is that it forces us to take a careful inventory of our time. What the eff are we doing with our days? If life is a performance and not a dress rehearsal, if we were fully cognizant of the hands of the clock marching inevitably forward, what would we do differently?

Intuitively, we understand that we have no time to waste, and yet (maddeningly) we do. We scroll, we binge, we numb, we multitask, and we tell ourselves the story that we’ll do it better tomorrow. We’ll prioritize the big dream in the morning. We’ll sit and write that book at the end of this long week. We’ll give up booze, toxic friends, empty partnerships, the weight of other people’s expectations… eventually.

But first, we’ll live with it.

Urgency is the lesson we humans need again and again. It’s not enough to get a single glimpse of our mortality and vow to carpe diem for all eternity. It’s a mission we have to commit ourselves to often — when we wake up in the morning and decide what information to absorb first (anything but the phone!), when we’re tired at the end of a long day and our children are begging us to pay attention to the 97th paper art project they’ve created this week (is this just my house??), and multiple times a day when we consider violating our own time and energy boundaries in favor of numbing out or putting other people’s needs above our own.

I’m sending this newsletter to you right now, Monday morning, because I’m hoping it will be one of the first pieces of writing you consume today. I’m hoping it will reach you in a moment that allows you to recommit yourself to urgency, and moreover, to not wasting your precious time, talent, dreams, and health.

Over the last 25 years, I have learned spades from K. about how to walk through this world with integrity. As a social worker (i.e. human angel) devoted to improving life for the unhoused, she has made a point never to look away from the hard things in life, nor to judge people by their difficult circumstances. K. is maybe the one Catholic school graduate who took that whole service ideal to heart and has made a life around it. Most importantly, she never fails to recognize and uphold the dignity of every individual she meets. She has wasted none of her compassion.

So, that’s the reminder — the lesson we must learn and relearn every day of our lives. Neither you nor I has time or treasures to waste. How we spend today matters.

This is the big show.

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Come See Me in the Good Light (Apple TV): I wrote last summer about the passing of Colorado Poet Laureate, Andrea Gibson. This documentary, about the last year of their life and their stunning partnership with writer megan falley, was a landing place for all my big feelings. Andrea’s words and vulnerable reckoning with their own mortality, are a gift to all those who need to recommit to the urgency of life.