What It Means To Live ‘A Hellova Life’
My dear friend Ellen Morgan lost her husband Bill this past January to Parkinson’s disease. Bill was a gentle soul, a superb poet, and dedicated literature professor at Illinois State University. As he neared the end, Bill would often tell others, “I’ve had a hellova life!”
I’ve wondered ever since if I could say the same thing if I knew my death was near. Could many of us?
One of the most memorable lines from the Rule of St. Benedict, that timeless guide for contemplative living, is: “Day by day, remind yourself you are going to die. Hour by hour, keep careful watch over all you do.” This isn’t some morbid exercise to depress us over our inevitable demise. It is meant to be a prescription for living fully.
As I was contemplating yet again Bill’s words (and St. Benedict’s), a woman who had read my most recent book How to Be, co-authored with Trappist Brother Paul Quenon, wrote to say how moved she was by sections in the book where Brother Paul describes losing his father, older brother and fellow monks. Included with her letter was another book she has been reading, Michael Hebb’s Let’s Talk About Death Over Dinner.
It was as though the book arrived on cue. Hebb is the founder of “Death Over Dinner,” an organization that brings together folks over a meal to share their thoughts, dreads, hopes and plans for the end of life. Thousands of people across the globe have joined the conversation.
“We need to face our mortality as a village, not as isolated individuals,” Hebb writes. “Given the right framing, a ‘difficult’ conversation does not need to be difficult. It can be liberating, it can be transformative.”
Both Michael Hebb’s and Bill Morgan’s words prompt me to think of how I might assess my life if I knew my time was short. What am I proud of? What am I ashamed of? What did I leave undone? Could I truly say mine was “a helluva life?”
Perhaps this says a lot about me, but the events that come first to mind are professional achievements. It was a “hellova” opportunity to begin my journalism career at the age of 21 at one of the nation’s premier newspapers, The Washington Post. I could say the same about having gone on to report for The Wall Street Journal and later, PBS-TV, becoming twice a Pulitzer Prize finalist in those years. I would also include on that list the five books and two collections of poetry I’ve written.
On the personal side, I thought of my time at the Sorbonne during my junior year abroad — a time when I became friends with students from Laos, Cambodia, Cameroon and India as well as France. I am thankful for the times I lived in Italy, the country where I feel the most at home. I am grateful especially for my most recent stay of three months in the same small town where I felt a part of the community.
I would rate my marriage as well at the top of the list, as I’m still astonished that someone as brilliant, talented and kind as my husband would choose me as a partner.
Okay, maybe it’s been a pretty good life.
Inevitably, the question arises of what remains undone. Again, as if by serendipity, there was a recent segment on NPR’s “Life Kit” featuring author Rachel Wilkerson Miller, who wrote the 2020 book, The Art of Showing Up. Wilkerson Miller says we fail to show up for our lives when we waste time doing things that don’t — or shouldn’t — matter to us.
Wilkerson Miller recommends completing a personal “time audit.” It includes tracking how we spend the minutes and hours of our days. Do we spend most of our time on the people and activities that are most important to us, or on unnecessary tasks? This question was an eye-opener for me. It drove home how much time I expend each morning on email because I feel I have to respond to everything that comes in.
I realized too how many times I end up feeling overwhelmed because I say yes to too many requests, not wanting to disappoint the people who ask me.
I’m working on how I can learn to say no more often so that I can spend more of the time I do have in loving the people I love and using whatever talents I have to make others feel welcome, seen and heard. In short, to do what I can to make a difference in this world.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who authored the ground-breaking 1969 book On Death and Dying, writes, “It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty, purposeless lives; for when you live as if you will live forever, it becomes too easy to postpone the things you know you must do.”
Or, as Hebb recommends, let’s aim to arrive at the door of death having fully become the person we want to be.
This week, can we pay closer attention to how we spend our time? Are we allowing ourselves to fall into distraction, or are we focusing on the things that matter most to us? Can we say we are living “a hellova life?”
Here is one of Bill Morgan’s poems to sit with, ponder and celebrate this coming week. It was read at his Celebration of Life last January:
A Vein of Peace
To know the names and manners
of the wild things passing before
our eyes and tapping at our ears –
the muskrat with his mound
of reeds, the beaver’s den
of sticks, the catbird’s scat-
singing, the brown thrasher’s
signature tic of saying
everything twice, the spiderwort’s
sky-blue opening after rain,
the cabbage-white, Sulphur,
and viceroy swimming the wind
to find their floral sustenance –
is to touch a precious vein
of peace. For these will give
their elegant fitness without cost
and not demand our care,
save only that we agree
we’ll not destroy the world.
