30 Years Left to Live

As you may already know, Reader, I think about death a lot. Death is usually not too far from my thoughts, and sometimes this is in a practical way, like “how do I help someone prepare for their end of life?” Sometimes it’s grief, as I continue to mourn friends and loved ones that I’ve lost (and I think grief never really leaves us, it just takes different shapes, and that’s okay. This could be an entire post in and of itself.), and sometimes this is in a more philosophical way. Like what I’ve been thinking about lately.

Whenever people ask “What would you do if you had six months (or whatever short amount of time) left to live?” the answers are always the same. Quit your job. Travel. Spend time with family and friends. It’s not an uninteresting question, but because the time frame is so short, I think it’s clear that we’re all going to prioritize the same sorts of things. When we have a small, finite bit of time, we know exactly what we want to do.

But death isn’t something that is abstract, or merely a hypothetical “what would you do if” question. It’s something that FEELS abstract because we’re not immediately facing it. But it’s still inevitable. None of us are getting out of here alive.

When I originally started thinking about this and writing this post, I thought, What if the question we asked was “What if you survived a near death experience, and then had 20 years left to live?” Because I think that people who undergo that experience prioritize their lives a little differently than those of us who haven’t had to confront the fragility of our mortality. But the more I think about it, the more I think the question should just be “What if I had 20 years left to live?” Or 30. Or whatever. Because the point of the question isn’t surviving a near death experience and changing your priorities. The point is accepting that our time is finite, no matter what happens to us, no matter what we survive, and then examining our priorities.

I feel like this question is a particularly important way of looking at middle age, and probably beyond, too. In my 20s, I’m not sure that I would have done much differently if I had been told I had 50-60 years left to live (and since I’m going to go for 100, since so many women in my family live to 98 or 99, it would have been more like 80 years left). Sixty years or 80 years is too much time to envision and plan for—in some ways, the possibilities are too broad. But now, in middle age, I know what 20 years feels like. I know what 30 years feels like. I know what 40 years feels like. And I can look back on these swaths of time and get an idea of what amounts of time might be left to me. I can get an idea of what it will be like to look back one day and say, oh my god that happened 60 years ago.

I think that our culture’s fear of death and aging can make middle age a difficult time for people. I think we tend to focus on the past, and look towards the future as if our clocks are running out. But what if we looked towards the future as a way to be creative? If I only have 20 years left, what do I want them to look like? People often create better under constraints and parameters, and isn’t time a type of constraint?

To a certain extent, this is very privileged exercise. I have a job, and I have a 401k that isn’t anywhere near what it should be, and I have a house. I have not saved enough to retire at 65. My house is not paid off. And if I get an expensive disease, like cancer, before I’m on Medicare, I’m fucked. But these, in a way, are also parameters. If I have to work and save, what do I want that work to look like? How can I change my life to better fit my values and my priorities? I can’t just quit everything and travel the world. So what, instead, can I do, and what do I want to do?

When you’re not dealing with severely finite time, and have practical constraints, I think how we spend our time and how we shape our lives is something that’s a little more difficult to parse out. We can’t just drop everything. But we don’t want to get stuck in a grind, working for a future that may never come to pass, either. With 20 years or 30 years, we have the luxury (hopefully) of planning. We can asked questions like: How many years of mobility can I expect to have? How many years of good cognitive functioning can I expect to have? How can I maximize those things? What do I need to do now in order to make the next 20 or 30 years more enjoyable and fulfilling?

I think we tend to get stuck, thinking half of our lives are over. But the converse of that is that we have half of our lives left. So what are we going to do with it?