Whose Life is It?

Last night I was part of the Memoir Project Performance Series at The Arts Center. Our curator had selected the theme of Mid-Life Epiphany. Here is the piece that I read:


Whose Life is It?

I’m not afraid of death. What I am afraid of is that time, just before death, when I take a last critical look at myself and think, “I wasn’t enough”.

I’m not afraid of physical pain but of the emotions I might face in those last minutes of life. Part of what haunts me is an odd euphemism.

Ten years ago, just this time of year, I got an early morning phone call. I heard the answering machine pick up and heard my oldest sister, Gloria, leaving a message. “It must be Mum,” I thought, “Something’s happened to my mother.”

I picked up the phone and blurted “Glor, is it Mum?” “Oh God no, Di,” she said, “I am so sorry but Joy went into the hospital yesterday to have some tests and she didn’t make it.”

I don’t remember the rest of the conversation. But I cannot forget that odd phrase that Gloria used to tell me that our sister, Joy, had died. I can still hear that slanted delivery; “She didn’t make it.” It sounded as if Joy had failed or had let us down by dying.

The memory of that euphemism makes me think about my own death --and consequently --my life. Will I disappoint someone when I die? Will I die with uncompleted work on my to-do list? Would a more successful, more organized woman, die better?

I think about this sometimes when I am driving to, of course, work. “Whose life is this?” I ask out loud, and “She didn’t make it” seeps back to me. Though outwardly I am successful, busy, and happy, it makes me wonder about the life I am living.

About the time I was having these car talks I was called to attend a corporate meeting at Key Bank; I was to meet with a group of bankers who were to help raise money for a nonprofit cause.

I was ushered into the Boardroom at KeyBank. The room was decorated in shades of gray. My heels sunk into the deep charcoal carpet and when I sat I sank into the lavish upholstered swivel chair.

The CEO opened the meeting. In his first sentence he used the words “Strategy”, “Patrol,” “Attack” and “Deploy.” I could feel myself shrinking. I held onto the tabletop to stop myself from swinging my seat from side to side.

As the CEO spoke I watched the group of bank “volunteers” –All men, in their forties and highly energetic. Each man assumed the same posture, leaning forward, elbows on the table, eyes on the Boss. Each man held a “good” pen. I recognized Gold Cross, Silver Meisterstruck and black Waterman.

I tried to take notes as I typically would in that kind of meeting but I was having trouble identifying the speakers. Usually I rely on a kind of sartorial shorthand. For example, I might jot down: “Blonde in Eileen Fisher thinks new plans are great,” or “Woman, print dress and pearls, disagrees.” Or “older guy with abstract tie wants numbers.” That way, when I went back to my office, I could reconstruct who said what. But here the players were almost identical. Each man was wearing a navy suit, blue shirt and yellow tie.

The feature that most compelled me, however, was a gold key that each man wore in his left lapel. I knew that all Key Bank employees wore these little pins. I had seen them on the women and men I met at Chamber of Commerce meetings. I knew the pin hierarchy: Plastic keys for general employees, red pins for managers, silver for execs and gold for senior VP’s. This was the Gold Key crowd. But what was unnerving was that I had never before seen a group of them together. Here were ten men with white faces, dark suits, similar ties, matching posture, mirrored energy levels, and a Gold Key stabbed into each one right- over- his- heart.

As the meeting continued I began to imagine the lives of these men. Some we’re on first marriages and others second, some had one child, some two. I could guess at their similar mortgages by the tension around their eyes and the way they leaned forward, constantly nodding to the rhythm of the CEO’s words. I wondered how they had gotten here. Did they notice that they were almost the same guy?

My eyes kept going back to the pins. The little gold keys seemed to have each man pinned. “You won’t wear that key to chemotherapy,” I heard myself think.

For those two hours I felt so superior. I don’t wear a pin to mark my loyalty to my organization, and though there are days when I wear a suit, I also have days of corduroys and sweaters. “Whose life are they living?” I thought, but “Whose life am I living?” followed without a pause.

The next shift in my thinking came around an event. Months before I had signed up to attend a fundraising gala. This particular event was an important place to see- and –be- seen.

But by Thursday of the event week I was tired. On Friday I felt anxious rather than relaxed. Saturday morning, driving to Saratoga to pick up my dress for the party, I begin to cry. “Whose life IS this?” came racing back. The party was important, but to whom and why?

As I drove through the postcard beauty of Fall in upstate New York, I thought: “This is crazy; this is no time to go to parties, this is the time to sit in the back yard.” In the car I spoke my debate out loud. I said to the car, “If I go to the party it will be good for me at work. If I go to the party I’ll get more points with my boss and social points, too.” But another voice inside of me asked: “But where will you cash in the scorecard with all those points?”

That question stopped me cold. I’ve been at the collection point many times. In the last ten years I’ve been to seven family funerals and made hundreds of visits to Intensive Care Waiting rooms. I regularly sat beside my comatose mother who, in her life had earned thousands of points but was now unable to redeem a single one of them for one minute of consciousness. How could I forget this simple fact: We turn in our scorecards in hospital beds, funeral homes and cemeteries.

Now I wish I could say that after that moment of enlightenment I tossed the gala tickets out the window and sang all the way home. But- I- didn’t. That’s the kind of story that makes it into “Chicken Soup” books. The hard news is that the decision to say “no” wasn’t easy.

The rest of my day was agony. I rationalized, I debated. I knew that I wasn’t going to the party, but first I had to sit in my backyard and cry.

Just as I am sure there is a high price for taking off one’s gold key pin , each choice we make takes us further from OR closer to some other thing, and each choice has a consequence. On the phone my friend Brigid read to me from Thomas Merton: “Each choice we make takes us closer to God, and further away from others, often others who love us.”

The day after my no-Gala experience I woke to one of the most beautiful days . I sat in my backyard as Fall was happening around me. I could hear the leaves letting go. My husband came outside to sit with me and we watched the leaves fall. “How do they know when to do that?” he asked. We laughed as I told him my version of an Al-Anon meeting for leaves: The very wise leaf says, “Well, you have to trust, you have to just turn it over and let go.” But the younger leaf, the one with “control issues” says, “Oh, no, I’m not letting go, I’m staying with the tree. We don’t know what’s down there.”

So what does it come down to then?

Faith, I think

Oh, we want so badly for life to be Sure. And clear. And settled. We want to do the right thing. But we make our lives from a set of choices and we can only hope we are making the right ones. But it’s a certainty that the right thing for someone is attending the gala and for someone else it is taking off the pin.

So whose life is it? And where do we turn in the scorecards? We don’t. That’s what makes it so hard. It’s easier to have faith in a score keeping system with a Right and a Wrong, a Good and a Bad. But there isn’t one. We make a life with choices. One- terrifying –exciting--choice at a time.