Two Months to Live: What Would You Do With Your Time?

A close friend wanted to know. Here’s my answer.

Justine called, out of the blue. We’ve known each other for years but haven’t spoken for most of them. We launched into catching up as though no time had passed, in that way that people who really love each other do. Justine is whip-smart, driven, half-Japanese, a woman whose brains and intensity are so bright sometimes she’s hard to take. Well, for some.

Justine’s my kind of woman. In every way the best kind of buddy.

Justine was a part of a women’s group I formed back in the Nineties. Like me, she’s a military veteran. She was just leaving the service. My women’s group was made up of the best and brightest I could find in the Inland Northwest. That’s another article. Most of us scattered to the winds, as did Justine.

I still envision her in her thirties. She’s 55, a shocker, but then my 67 probably hit her the same way. Her voice, full of the rich intelligence, confidence and humor, is the same.

We spoke for three hours. We usually do. I think the shortest time we ever had was closer to two. I love talking to Justine for a thousand reasons. As she gets ready to take her pension, move to another state where her military disability isn’t taxed to death, she was intensely curious about what kind of legacy I was going to leave.

Hence, the question about two months to live, above.

She was insistent. She wanted to know, for as she approaches her last decades, she’s trying to figure out the answer to this question for herself.

Asking what we want on our headstone after we’re buried is a common inspirational speaker’s method of trying to get our collective heads out of the sand and into the moment. What, exactly, is our gift to the world?

That we had 500,000 followers on Instagram?

If I’d been asked that question a few years ago, my answer would be very different. I had more time. I didn’t know what I know now, and that doesn’t include our current Conditions. Before that.

Today? Well.

Two parts to this: the stuff I can’t take with me: Stuff. Money, what there is of it.

What little I might have left is split between National Public Radio and the Safina Center, which does superb ecological work and research in the world.

What would I want to do with that time?

It depends, doesn’t it? If you have family, siblings, a partner. What kind of work you do. What speaks to your deepest soul.

I’m kinda solo out here.

No family. No kids. Justine’s kids are in their twenties, two smart boys that she prepared well for the world. She still has big responsibilities.

My “kids” are my books. Articles. What I might create.

But the current Conditions put my latest book on hold. Horror writer Stephen King said in a recent NPR interview that he recently had to reset the timing of his current novel because of what’s happening, to a time when his characters still lived in relative normalcy.

While I am no Stephen King, my third book, which was about finding what we came here to do, especially late in life, similarly has had to be shelved for the time being. It would hardly appropriate right now.

If I had only two months to live, with all due respect to whomever might have wanted to read the nonsense I produce, I wouldn’t likely be motivated to spend the remainder of my time on earth penning my last book.

I’ve been alive long enough and seen enough so that I recognize that in the largest scheme of things, my life is largely meaningless. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t have value.

My value has far more to do with the love I give.

When I let my heart embrace Justine’s question, I was taken back to a challenge my coach threw at me when I returned from Ethiopia last December. I told him that the times I was the happiest were when I was working on animals.

He asked, pointedly, that if that put the bird in my chest, why wasn’t I doing more of that?

I promptly dissolved into tears.

Like many of us I’ve had a very hard time giving myself more time doing that I most dearly love. For me, that’s working with animals: big, small, rough, soft, hairy, scaled. I get the greatest pleasure working with the biggest ones in cultures where animals are not valued as individuals with emotions and rights and sensibilities. Those cultures aren’t wrong. They haven’t gotten there yet. May never.

When I work with an animal where it has rarely or never known affection, the response I get in return is a gift beyond all understanding. Beyond all measure. I communicate with a language that is my own. To the human ear it’s nonsensical gobbledy-gook. Every single animal I’ve ever worked with got it. Because combined with my hands (I’m a trained masseuse, albeit for humans) and my tone, there’s no question about what I’m saying.

To pilfer from Dr. Carl Safina’s seminal book on animal communication, I am indeed Beyond Words.

Given that this is what I love best, and what I have to offer seems to be rather well received, that’s what I’d do with my two months. I’d get myself however I could to wherever I could have 24/7 access to animals, and live out the rest of my days doing just what I am doing in these photos.

Some people close to me, close to you, may well be dealing with just this very difficult question. For some, the answer comes so swiftly that there is hardly time to wave goodbye. The terrible immediacy of loss does indeed beg the question of what’s so damned important, anyway?

What, that you were super skinny? That you made ten grand a month on Medium? That you had the biggest biceps on your block?

In my book, it would be love. However, what that looks like, how we best express love is as unique as our fingerprints.

If I had the ability, if I had the means, I would find myself surrounded by animals. Even if that meant I had to walk to the nearest stable, and get permission to work on the horses. I’d find a way.

And of course, I’d write about it. Some, at least.

It’s not that I don’t love the people in my life. It’s that they have other priorities. Their own families. This doesn’t sadden me at all.

But for the animals I touch, as you can see in these photos, I am their top priority in that moment. If nothing else, they get the gift of a wholly different kind of love. Sometimes, it even changes what their caretakers think. And sometimes, it can change how they treat these animals.

For example, two calves that I spent a lot of time with were supposed to be used for roping, a sport that I despise for many reasons. They got so sweet and so tame they refused to bolt. Worked like a charm. Funny what love does.

That would be my legacy. Finally loving myself enough to spend time doing what I most love to do. And in doing so, maybe, just maybe, it might change how a human treats their animals. I’ve seen it happen with camels, a cow, the calves.

Justine thought hard. I think she was expecting something far more grand. Sweeping, majestic, impressive. Some enormous, self-aggrandizing gesture.

Nope.

When I let go of the need to be important, to feel important or superior or better than, or to set a record that might live on a piece of concrete in some school wall or whatever the hell I think might bolster my tender ego, that was a key to freedom. One of many.

The older I’ve gotten, the more I understand that how we came here to express love, to receive love, however we best receive it, is perhaps more important than leaving a great building or a dam or even a telescope named after you, as a distant cousin of mine, Edwin P. Hubble, did. His legacy as a righteous asshole was so seriously bad that after his death, his wife refused to let on what she did with his body. (with thanks to the great writer Bill Bryson, whose version of my jerk of cousin made me laugh so hard I nearly expired on the spot.)

Impressive. The telescope, not the asshole.

Nah. Give me furballs. Let me love on some creatures. If I passed away quietly curled up with some great huge cow or camel or quarterhorse, covered with straw and probably smelling like a barn, nobody would be happier.

What would you do with two months left? How might you leave the world?

This is what love looks like in my world. I am the safest around huge, powerful creatures, creatures great and small, creatures grateful for kindness. This is some of my most important work.

What’s yours?

Sawubona.