“Get busy living or get busy dying.” Any Shawshank Redemption fans out there will recognize this as a line spoken by Tim Robbins while playing the character of Andy Dufresne, a man wrongly convicted of murdering his wife. When I was younger, I had a hard time grasping what this line meant. I understood the general concept of course; however, my runway of life was such that the idea of death and dying wasn’t even on my radar.
Friends dying young and the act of aging has a way of changing that perspective pretty quickly.
When I was a child, the idea of my mother dying was horrifying. I didn’t want my father to die either; however, my mom was my world. Raising me and my brothers with little help from my dad, she was the ballast of our family ship, always there to comfort and provide the warmth I needed growing up. The thought of her death was too much for my young mind to grasp and not something I liked to dwell on.
My mom is still with us and I’m extremely thankful for that. An adulthood of heart surgeries and other health issues was supposed to have greatly impacted her lifespan. Through the miracle of modern medicine coupled with a positive outlook on life, she reached and has now moved past her 80th birthday. I’m thankful everyday I still have her to talk to and confide in.
The death of a young child is tragic. I think we can all agree on that. The loss of a life not lived is difficult to comprehend and even more difficult for us to accept. The childlike thoughts of my mom dying have been replaced with those of my children and my wife. I’m going to assume this is normal. Where my mom had been my rock, my family now resides in the same space.
My father passed away seventeen years ago last month. Although it was traumatic at the time, life has continued to move forward, providing many twists and turns since then. I remember sobbing uncontrollably for a man that I knew on the surface but hadn’t ever cracked the code of his internal workings. He was a mystery and now that he was gone, he’d remain shrouded in mystery forever.
Whether we like it or not, we’re all going to die. Thousands of people are sitting in a hospital room or in hospice at this very moment gasping their last breath. It may be macabre to think or write about, but that doesn’t make it any less true. What we do while we still have breath in our body matters to those we love and care about most.
Working all hours of the day and on weekends in order to provide for the kids you’re neglecting while you work makes little sense. Telling yourself you’re giving them the life you never had may be true from a financial sense but how else may you be negatively impacting them? We’re only the age we are once in our lives and the same goes for your kids. Taking advantage of each day and living with the idea that you will at some point die can be liberating. It removes the veil of anything material holding any value in our lives and replaces it with those that do.
Death is something that happens to us all. Knowing this is fact and having it in mind when you’re prioritizing what matters provides freedom and perspective from the material possessions ruling over your life.
There’s a reason people say, “you can’t take it with you.” Anything material stays here after we’re gone.
The good news is, so do the memories, time spent and compassion we shared with those we love.
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