the would-be writers guild

Our writing assignment last month was to write our own obituaries.  I had a hard time coming up with mine.  For about three weeks, all I had written down was, “Aw crap, I died.”  Finally last night, thirty minutes before the writers arrived I wrote this:

Just for the record, I’m not very happy about being dead.  I liked life.  I liked it a lot, and my plan was to live a very long time and to love lots of people and to accumulate a ton of shoes.  Obviously, if this is being printed, the plan was cut short which shouldn’t surprise me because I learned a long time ago to count on plans changing.

I had a great life, the kind that is interesting, exciting, thrilling, and exhausting every single day.  In my life I was surrounded with good people and thankfully I was aware enough to truly appreciate them.  I loved visiting people and hearing their stories and sending them emails and getting their Christmas letters.  I believed that people mattered more than anything, and happiness was found in treating them with reverence.

I grew up in a great family, with loving parents who fostered my talents and siblings I have grown to love and respect. (Well, at least once we all stopped flipping rubber bands at each other and stealing each other’s socks.)

I married young, which is usually risky, but I counted it solidly as the most important and correct decision of my life.  My husband, Ryan, was the other half of my heartbeat and even though he was terrible at putting his clothes in the hamper, I will continue loving him through time and space.  We were a great pair, in an incredible partnership that gave me the confidence that we would accomplish or overcome anything in our path.  Perhaps even this.  My plan in death will be to reach out to him and the boys in every available moment to send my love through the wind and sunrises and every lost penny found on the ground.

I’m particularly upset about leaving my kids.  Children shouldn’t have to bury their parents when they are still young, and I plan on being mad about this for at least a thousand years and maybe longer.  As the song goes, they really were my sunshine.  I was enamored with them and privileged beyond words to have been their mother.  My hope for them will be to find happiness, to follow dreams, to savor life, to feel this pain and then to let it go.

The ring tone on my cell phone, selected on the day I bought it, was a song called “Bittersweet Symphony”.  I never had the desire to change it because it came to mean so much to me.  Life is a bittersweet symphony.  There is pain and sadness and devastation everywhere, with a piece or two of it for everyone.  But beyond that is the beauty and magnificence of a living, breathing body.  There is no sweetness to match a heartbeat, true love, children, friendship, or faith in something bigger than yourself.

I read once that writers live everything twice—once in the moment, and then again as they write it down.  Maybe that’s why I liked writing so much, and reciprocally, maybe that’s why I loved life so much too.  I have no regrets.  It didn’t pass me by.  I guess I can thank my husband and the premature deaths of his parents for that.  Perhaps that is the only gift of death to the living, that you will recognize life’s fragility and live every day as if there may never be another.  And maybe you will also recognize that you should put your dirty clothes in the hamper because, seriously, it’s so annoying.