Yeah, that says mortality.
Don’t worry, I’ll try to not make this morbid. I know that you don’t want to think about mortality. Neither do I! But, I find my mind going there a lot more often than it used to.
Around the time of my diagnosis and before my surgery, a close friend of the family was killed in an accident. It was gut wrenching and senseless, and I still cry when I think of the hole that’s left in our lives, his family’s life, etc.
Having an experience like that (and, I hope you never do), makes you think about the fragility of life. One day you are here, and then you are not. What do you leave behind?
In my case, it would be a big fat mess. On the horders scale of 1-10, 10 being condemnation, I think our house wavers on a 3-4.5. (Definitely 4.5 if you include the yard.) There are eight closets in my house, and they all need to be cleaned out and reorganized. My office is a mess, the laundry room is overflowing.
So, I have a list of all these spaces that I want and need to organize and clean. I started in my younger daughter’s closet this week. As I sort though a year’s worth of clothes and toys, papers and trash, that have been thrown in this closet, I think how I’m glad that I’m doing this so that someone else wouldn’t have to deal with this mess if I were gone. It’s kind of morbid, but the fact is that we are all going to die.
I remember having a conversation with my sister shortly after my diagnosis. I explained that I realized that at any time my life could be over – I could walk out the door and get hit by a car and be gone. But, there’s something about getting a cancer diagnosis that makes you face your mortality in a much more realistic way. Now I live with the knowledge that there’s a good chance I won’t live to be a hundred like I had thought before.
As I cleaned the closet, filling another bag of toys to give away, I keep asking myself, how did it get this bad? Why haven’t I tackled this sooner?
Well, the answer is “life”. We’re busy – school, work, family, etc., instead of cleaning a closet, I was living life. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive. I realize that keeping up with the clutter would have prevented this multi-day project, but I had my priorities, and cleaning a closet was not one of them.
Still, I’ll take whatever motivation I can get, and if that includes the fact that I wouldn’t want to leave my loved ones with this mess, then I will use that to keep me at the task.
But, I will also balance that with living life and attending to my priorities. It’s trite, but true – “I wish I had cleaned more closets” said no one on their death bed.
