Death Is Imminent. So Why Not Live?

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Around a decade ago, I began to fixate on what I believed were solid truths about myself. Backed up by what looked like clear evidence, drawn from many episodes of my life so far, these truths were the answer to a question that nobody but me had ever bothered to ask: Who are you, really? I wasn’t after the obvious, of course—not your dating-profile traits or the milquetoast compliments and evaluations you might acquire, as a matter of course, on LinkedIn. I wanted a hint or two of insight from yours truly. Nothing especially deep, just a couple of principles that would define how I operate. Axiomattic principles, as it were. Here’s what I came up with:

1. I’m good at taking risks.

2. I can consciously change how I think about things.

Risks: Skateboarding as a teen, sure, but after college, in 1996, I moved to Vietnam without any particular plan. I did the same thing two years later, to New York, and again six years later back to Vietnam and Cambodia. I took a chance calling 411 for the phone number of the roommate of a woman I’d met at a group dinner, and that woman became my wife. Without really intending to, I’ve spent my life making bets on big decisions, and whether it’s been luck or skill, things have generally turned out well. And when they haven’t? I’ve always had an escape plan, a backup that would allow me to retreat and regroup. Less charitably, you could frame this principle as: What can I get away with?

Metacognition: In college, I was learning how to drink coffee—trying to make the transition from instant French Vanilla to pure black drip—when I realized: To appreciate the rich bitterness of unadulterated coffee, I needed to start really appreciating it. That is, I needed to understand that flavor, that mouthfeel, and like them for what they were, now what I imagined they should be. Once I decided to do that, I broadened this philosophy to encompass all foods—if I didn’t like something, it was my failing, not the food’s—and indeed all experiences. The world should be taken on its own terms, not made to conform to my whims, or resented if it failed to bow. And once I realized that I could simply adjust my attitude in this way, I saw that I could do it in so many others, quashing anger, elevating joy—choosing to think and feel how I wanted to think and feel at any given moment, rather than being ruled by my emotions. I could step outside myself, pause, and think logically about where to go next.

You could argue that both of these relate to a desire for control—control over the things hardest to control—but I didn’t think about that then. Instead, I just tucked these two little observations into an unused synapse and went on with my life.

Then, more or less three years ago from right now, I got cancer, and things changed.

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I hate saying I got cancer because my cancer wasn’t the worst kind. It was skin cancer—a mole on my left forearm that my dermatologist found “interesting,” that he sliced off me on the spot, that was tested at the lab, and that came back as a Stage 2 malignant melanoma. If I’d gone on ignoring it, if I hadn’t already had a regular dermatologist, if that test and the more invasive Mohs surgery six weeks later had turned out differently, that thing would’ve killed me dead. But it didn’t. In all, from that first doctor’s visit to learning, after surgery, that the cancer had not spread to my lymph nodes, this amounted to two and a half months—barely a blip.

Yet those two and a half months fucked me up bad. Every morning when I opened my eyes, my very first thought was: “I have cancer.” I couldn’t escape it, the thoughts would intrude, and there was nothing I could do because, well, this was it. What else could matter more, what else merited my attention? And try as I could to step outside of my thoughts and shift them in another direction—in literally any other direction—I couldn’t. My body had turned on itself, and now so was my mind. The mental pliability that I’d believed was my strength, that I’d thought defined me, had gone rigid.

My thoughts circulated around and around the idea of risk as well. What had I done wrong? Where had I fucked up? Okay, it was obvious: I’d never been one for sunscreen, and I loved running outside. But which particular ultraviolet ray was responsible for the mutation—the one that made my back peel when I was 9, the one that reddened my knees in my 20s, the ones that pelted me throughout miles and miles of marathon training? It could have been any of them, all of them, none of them. Where had I miscalculated, and what was my escape plan? There could be no answer, of course, and because there could be no answer, there was no end to the questions.

And then, goddamn it, I lived! It was all over but the bills and a few years of oncological followups. I had a dope scar and a partially shaved armpit. I felt ecstatic. I felt like an idiot. While I was maundering, one friend had been diagnosed with the gastric cancer that would kill him within a year. Another—one with a rare genetic anomaly—was dealing with cancer no. 14 (or was it 15? 16?), and he’d go on to beat that, as he would a half dozen more, and counting. At least three other friends would soon have mastectomies. What was my two months compared to their eternities? Who was I to fret and whinge?

Or really: Who was I at all? I tried to continue to live by my self-defined principles. I decided that, having survived, I would reprogram myself again: Since I might die at any time, I would live as never before! I would choose happiness, pleasure, and satisfaction at every turn, and stop subjecting myself to the miseries I’d typically endure. Why wait? I told myself. Except… Mostly that meant spending a bit more money on random things—a new armchair, for instance, or staying at slightly nicer hotels on vacation. Risks these were not. But nothing I surveyed seemed worth taking a chance on—no endeavor promised the transformative freedom I sought. Instead, I played it safe. I lived as I had before, more grateful perhaps for this second chance, but unchanged.

And yet safe wasn’t very safe. On a routine snowboarding trip the day before Christmas, while finishing my very first run, I caught an edge, flipped over, and whacked the back of my head on the ground. Concussion and brain bleed¹. Six months later, almost to the day, I tripped while running and broke my right ring finger². On a routine checkup with my surgical oncologist, he warned me not to do “risky things.”

I scoffed. None of what I did was risky—it was normal! I wasn’t hotdogging on the mountain; I wasn’t sprinting when I tripped. Both accidents resulted from the minuscule miscalculations we all make all the time, only usually with milder consequences. And I wasn’t about to dial back my life, this post-cancer life I’d vowed to live more fully—this life that was, somewhat disappointingly, quite familiar.

I’ve been torn for a long while now, between the risks—professional, artistic, whatever—I imagine myself capable of and the rewards of simply enjoying what I’ve already got. (Maybe you are, too?) As torments go, it’s a privileged one: Honestly, I’ll be good either way.

But still I feel compelled to try to resolve this. Was I ever the person I thought I was? And if I’m not—if I can’t manage my own thoughts and can’t summon the will to risk—then what am I now? Maybe I’m the same person I always was, albeit with fewer illusions, or different ones. What person do I even want to be? Is it possible that I’m actually happy with life? If that’s true, why can’t I shake this dissatisfaction that vibrates through me?

Lately, though, things feel different. Maybe it’s the election, and I have less patience than ever for the shenanigans to come. Maybe it’s this newsletter, which is giving me a way to structure and restructure my thoughts on the daily. (What can I get away with here?) I find myself using whatever megacognitive control that remains to order myself to worry less, to enjoy what happens as it happens, with no eye on the future. A time for risks—real risks—will come one day, maybe soon or maybe not so soon, and when it does, I’ll be ready for it. And until then all I can do is ponder the words of the great existentialist Mike Tyson, who, when asked by a 14-year-old girl to consider his legacy, told her: “I’mma die, and it’s gonna be over. Who cares about legacy after that? We’re nothing, we’re dead, we’re dust, we’re absolutely nothing, our legacy is nothing.” Pretty dark, dude, but for a guy who once bit off his opponent’s ear, I’d call it progress.

Look, I don’t know where this will end. All I know is that I might not be the person I once was, if I ever was that person in the first place, and in fact I might still be whoever the hell that person is, or was, or wanted to be. This isn’t one of those “how cancer changed me” stories with a clear arc; it’s more like the last 100 pages of Gravity’s Rainbow³, a slow dissolution of the very idea of plot and character that reminds us the universe just doesn’t work like that. Still, here I am, having survived cancer and concussion, good decisions and dreadful ones, certain that something has happened along the way if uncertain about what precisely that was. Will I ever figure it out? Will it matter if I succeed or fail? I like to believe that most of us are engaged in this effort, of working to understand who we are and who we’ve become and what we’re capable of and what we want—know thyself, amirite?—but I wonder if that ever truly helps. Is understanding ever a way out? I don’t know, and I may never know before I’m dust, but I do know this: I have to try.

Notes

1. Yes, I was wearing a helmet.

2. I was not wearing a helmet.

3. How’s that for a literary reference everyone will surely get?

Read Yesterday’s Attempt