What would you do if you knew your next birthday would be your last?
Back when I was in my late 20s, my mom turned 55 on a cool April day. “Fifty-five and alive!” I remember her saying. She had stage four colon cancer, and the doctors were starting to run out of treatment options. A month later, they’d tell her it was time to take that last vacation. Not long after that, I stood beside her casket, singing “Praise God, From Whom All Blessings Flow” under the cemetery canopy with the balloons she’d requested for the occasion stirring in the breeze behind me.
Mom’s death shifted the way I saw life. As I aged into my 30s and then my 40s, I found myself tracking time with an end date in mind. A person lives until they are 55, and that’s all they’re promised, a voice in my head kept telling me.
Life became more urgent as the years passed. You’re not doing it all. You’re not accomplishing enough. You’re running out of time, the voice said.
And now, here I am, turning 55 myself. And utterly flabbergasted at how happy that makes me.
A year ago, the day before my 54th birthday, I had a mammogram that would turn into a cancer diagnosis. It came as no surprise. I was the same age Mom was when she learned she had cancer, and I’d long expected myself to walk the same path she did.
Except I didn’t. Chemo and a mastectomy and radiation have made the past year interesting, to be sure. But I went through it knowing I’d come out the other end OK. That was a reassurance Mom never had. She knew when she declared “55 and alive!” that she probably wouldn’t see her 56th birthday.
And yet, on her last birthday, that lovely woman made her declaration with real joy. Real hope. Real zest for life, whatever that life looked like.
In the months that followed, she and Dad went to Boston and watched whales. She kept meeting with the “Lunch Bunch” she’d started at church to give older folks something to do. She kept hugging the little kids who flocked to her after her decades of teaching. As her strength failed and the tumor grew in her thinning frame, she kept showing up at church on Sunday mornings, never missing until the day before she died in her living room recliner, my brother and I kneeling at her side and holding her hands as she left us for Heaven.
I didn’t know my mom as well as I now wish I had. I was in my 20s when she died, self-absorbed and focused on my own future, her first grandchild growing inside me. But as I type about her in a coffee shop, marking my own 55 and Alive day, I feel her beside me, nudging me toward life. And joy. And doing what matters most, because time is not a given.
I recently rediscovered a list I started about a year ago, titled, “Things I love.” It’s a scattershot sampling, not nearly as long as it could be, including the smell of tomato plants, listening to my kids, and rescuing bugs from being squished. At the top of the list is my very favorite go-to activity: getting lost on country roads. The list makes me happy. And it reminds me that joy is not a matter of chance. We can choose it. We can seek it out.
On a recent back-road drive, sneaking peeks of beguiling woods and little streams and contemplating my coming significant birthday, I found myself laughing with astonishment.
I could be dead.
But I’m not.
That’s so freaking amazing.
A fire in my belly urges me to go, do, accomplish, fix problems, change the world. Don’t get a wrong picture of me, here – I’m no superachiever. I’m as lazy as the next guy and think Big Thoughts far more often than I do Big Things. But the fire still burns, telling me I gotta do more, gotta be more.
And that’s true, in its way. A strong, safe world is an all-play, and we all have roles in bettering our communities and the lives of those around us.
But doing more and being more can walk alongside joy. They can come with peace, and strength, and deep breaths and drives in the country and cat cuddles and noticing the sunlight making sparkles on the walls. I can lead a purposeful, meaningful life and still marvel daily at being alive, at having time to do one more thing, love one more person, rescue one more bug.
It doesn’t matter how old you are. You have Things to Do. And you have time – at least today – to do them. Isn’t that just the most amazing thing? Revel in the joy of it, friends. And when our time runs out, well then, we praise God, from whom all blessings flow, that we had this time, to do. To be. To live.
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Because I could, and because it sounded fun, I designed a “55 and Alive” sticker that I uploaded to the website Redbubble. It’s a site made for creators to be able to sell their artwork to others, but I use it to make and print stickers I want for myself. There’s probably a bunch of other ways to do the same thing. I mention it not to promote Redbubble, but because I figured someone else might like knowing it’s possible to make your own stickers and buy them from yourself. It’s fun. Here’s my sticker, if you want to see it.
