Those last few moments...

…come to all of us. It’s how we work. And today I was skulling about what I want to be thinking and how I want to be feeling when my last few moments come.

Now, before any of my friends worry that the following discussion of my eventual morbidity is occasioned by the receipt of some sort of untoward news of the medical variety, allow me to put your minds at rest. Unless we suddenly discover that bad taste in clothing or a penchant for being a smart ass are indicators of impending permanent supinity, I should be okay for the time being. For those who were hoping that this was perhaps the case, sorry to disappoint.

No, this came up just because I was updating my bucket list and realized to my great glee that I’ve many more things I’d love to do or learn or experience than I likely could have done or learned or experienced had I started on the list to the exclusion of all other pursuits thirty years ago. I find life and the world and the things in it endlessly interesting and (mostly) amusing.

There are books I should have read as a teenager or a young adult that I won’t get to and people keep writing good books faster than I can read. I haven’t even done the Cambridge classics list. About seven years ago I started in on the required reading list for a great books program at a local university. There are about eighty books on the list. I’ve read three. In seven years.

This is not to say I stopped reading. I read a book or two a week, on average. But it’s hard to get wound up about Homer when Amy Tan is sitting there on my shelf. A half hour at Half-Price Books puts me completely off my game.

There are so many places I want to go and I go see a new one every now and again. But any serious attempt to visit even all the places I want to see in Washington would mean never visiting any place twice and Fodor be damned, I have my favorites! Yes, I want to paddle Crescent Lake but I also love Lake Easton and never tire of Lake Union or Elkhorn Slough or Salmon Bay. And I haven’t even taken the surf paddling course yet! What’s a boy to do?

I’d like to think I’ve yet to meet a lot of people who will become friends but I’ve so little time now to see the friends I already hold dear.

And so it goes.

I’ve acted as eulogist for friends and family over the years and attended a number of bon voyage observances as an observer. We so frequently speak of the departed as having had a full life, and the high water mark seems to be having left nothing undone, no brass ring ungrasped.

Not me. I want my list to continue to grow and I hope not to ever run out of things for which I hope to find time and energy. Which brings us to the bind… The time available for my various pursuits is not infinite.

It sucks the big one that I have to die someday. Not because I fear death; it would be silly to fear that which can’t be avoided and that even the greatest coward of history accomplished competently. And I won’t consider it unfair. Again, the ultimate in even distribution argues against personal affront.

But for those of you who happen to be with Mary when my ashes go in the river, I want you to know that day that I’ll be righteously pissed. Not at loss of a life that has already been more full and satisfying than anyone deserves. I’ll just be frustrated at my abject failure to complete the items on a list that I’ve spent a lifetime building. So on that day, if you loved me, please don’t waste minutes or hours ‘honoring’ me. I promise I will haunt the first one of you who makes a lame comment about ‘celebrating’ my life.

Celebrate your own. Think of something you’d like to do and go do it. Because I guarantee you that when those last minutes come to me, I’ll be denying the end until the end, and thinking of things I want to do or learn or experience next.

If you want to do something for the newly silent moi, burn my underwear. No one should have their underwear outlive them. Certainly not me – trust me on this.