Earlier today, I emerged from a Propofol haze, which sounds glamorous—very midlife spa—a clean, medically sanctioned blackout (and the best sleep of your life) requiring you to sign twenty forms confusingly saying that you might die, but also: statistically unlikely, very peaceful, and do you have an advance directive just in case?
Are you at peace with your earthly belongings?
Your people?
Actually—no. I have things to take care of before—
Then you’re gone.
Propofol does not wait for closure. You disappear efficiently, professionally, and with excellent drugs.
Overseen. Documented. Billed.
It’s hard not to be convinced anesthesia is how it ends. Not in a dramatic way. Not with a headline. Just quietly. Lights out. Someone mumbling in the distance, “Huh. That was weird.”
Game over.
But if you come back, everyone acts like this was normal- this scrambling of your sense of time and space; of control. You don’t do anything. You don’t will yourself back. You are simply returned, like a library book. A hurried nurse offers you a Dixie cup of water and tells you not to drive or drink alcohol for the rest of the day. Please get dressed.
Life is waiting. Go forth–sit in traffic and answer emails.
But things are anything but normal, because you have returned from a very brief, very well-lit rehearsal for death. As they hustle you into a wheelchair with more forms (there are other people in the queue waiting to maybe die), you are forced to reckon with the fundamental organizing principle of the universe:
We are all dying right now.
Not dramatically. Not tragically. Just steadily. Same people. Different lighting.
Come Make Soon
The Hawaiians have a phrase—Come Make (ma-kay) Soon.
It means dead soon.
Very chill. Extremely direct.
Live well. Live right. Do it quickly.
“How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.”
-Annie Dillard
A beautiful sentiment that becomes borderline threatening on a Tuesday afternoon.
“Live your best life now! Every single moment!” This is so annoying because it’s nearly impossible to sustain. It sounds inspiring until you remember you just spent forty-five minutes mentally responding to an email from your corrupt boss.
If put to the task, most of us can make a solid list of what matters most, but the problem isn’t knowing what matters.
What matters has a low capture rate and rarely screams the loudest.
No one, on their deathbed, will think: Thank God I obsessed over politics, and other drivers. And yet—we do.
Watch your inputs. Distractions, as Woody Allen said, are just ways to avoid death. A world bursting with possibilities makes it easy to confuse motion with meaning. So many places, books, skills, causes, people! But only a tiny fraction of them are available to each of us. So most of life isn’t choosing what to do. It’s choosing what to let go of.
That’s the grief no one prepares you for.
Facing finitude—real finitude—destroys certainty and forces constant recalibration:
Bills vs. meaning: worry masquerading as responsibility, eating the hours whole.
Responsibility vs. Come Make Soon: guarding against imagined futures while the present goes unattended.
Every unfinished project. Every unbegun dream. Every unsent text hums beneath the surface. Anything can happen at any moment.
The Quiet, Unstoppable Math of Loss
I’m probably fine with my own mortality. It’s everyone else’s that wrecks me. The people I love. The quiet, unstoppable math of loss.
Maybe that’s the only honest way to be alive.
Which increasingly means this:
Permission Slip
Stop futurizing. Stop pastizing. Do the next best thing. (Full disclosure: I spend a lot of time in decades before my own birth. Old photos. Vintage things. Other people’s lives. A hat. A shoe. A chipped mug. Proof someone stood here once and now doesn’t. Maybe I’m still reconciling time and space. Or maybe I just don’t want everything to disappear without a witness.)
Which brings me here:
Everyone I love is going to die, and I don’t know when. (There’s a snack for that )
That truth sounds cruel—but it’s actually clarifying. It gives you permission:
To say the thing.
To soften.
To make amends.
To stop hoarding resentment like it’s useful.
You Can’t Take It With You
Achievements. Failures. Titles. Grievances. Salary comparisons. Dumb drivers.
What’s left?
People. Attention. Love.
So act like it.
