Top Ten Things To Do (Before I Die)

10: Go to Norway

That’s how these lists always start out, isn’t it? Something real bloody generic. Like, nobody cares that you want to go to Norway. Just like nobody cares about your vacation pictures, or that your dog died, or that you got the flu, unless they’re in close proximity to you. I wonder if anyone will really care about my death.

But in all seriousness, Norway would be a cool place to go to in the last few months I have. It had been something suggested to me by my first ever girlfriend, when I was nineteen, and thought, yeah, I’ll get around to that someday, but mentally filing it under the ‘not particularly important’ label in my mental filing cabinet.

And I have the feeling it’s the sort of thing Rhonda, being the shrink that she is, wants me to say. Yeah – I don’t want to beat up that person that bullied me in high school. I don’t want to tell my parents I hate them. I want to go to Norway. I’m an emotionally healthy dying person. I mean, what use is it to therapize someone who’ll be dead in six months anyway? You can’t fix everything, and as much as depression is a symptom of living, it’s also a symptom of dying.

But then again, she’d want me to be honest. That is the point of assigning me this whole exercise after all. To stop lying to myself. To do something honest, genuine – maybe even kind, to myself, to others. Easier said than done. Up until now, I never expected to have a desire to live an honest life, whatever that means. Perhaps because I never believed in any divine retribution. But then again, if the only thing keep you from being a shitty person is the threat of retribution, you are a shitty person nonetheless.

9: Climb a mountain, or skydive, or some crap like that

This one is a little more daring, I suppose, but it’s still such a cliché, isn’t it? It’s inauthentic. Truth and inauthenticity are not mutually exclusive, as I’m quickly discovering. Besides, I doubt they let people who have severe, terminal cirrhosis of the liver skydive. I only have six months, I don’t want to spend it pissing down my leg at ten thousand feet.

Perhaps the reason it feels so inauthentic is that it’s too grand. I need to work smaller. Things don’t have to be big to be meaningful, right? You know what they say. Good things, small packages. God, death is turning me into a walking platitude.

8: Take up smoking

Now here’s the greatest irony of all: instead of doing something to help myself, or the people around me, what I most want to do is just to drive myself deeper into the ground by swapping one life-threatening habit for another. Of course I had to quit drinking to keep my place on the transplant list (roughly 3016^th on the transplant list, I’m sure), not that I’m holding out for a particularly fruitful organ harvest in the time I have left. But smoking – now, weirdly, that’s something I’ve never tried.

It felt honest at first, but after thinking about it for a while, I realized it wasn’t. The drinking will kill me before the smoking does. So it’s a zero-risk game. I wondered what the appeal of smoking actually was. Once you take away the chance you could die, it suddenly doesn’t hold much interest anymore.

7: Have a threesome

I chuckled at writing this one. Here I was, an ageing, miserable old man with bum organs, imagining a hot night with two willing (and completely imaginary) young twenty-somethings. Somehow, I doubt my wife, Delaney, would approve. Maybe a parting gift. Again, a sour chuckle.

The thing is, everyone I know who’s had a threesome seems to relay that there isn’t much to say about them. It’s a porn fantasy, expect one person is always left out, and changing positions is even more arduous than when you’re only two to tango. I imagine a lot of clambering about, hitting one’s knees and elbows on bedposts. Especially at my age.

And yet, it’s honest. Brutally honest, at that, in a house of serial monogamy and an aversion to any semblance of ‘sexual deviance’. Honest. But yet, still too flippant.

6: Buy Delaney that necklace you’ve always passed in the shop and thought would look good on her

It’s not like I didn’t have the money. I just always thought it could be better spent. But now, I’m not so sure. I’m sure I can use some of my superannuation on a small parting gift for the woman who’s stuck with me through the shit-show that is terminal illness. Have to spend it on something. Still, though, something feels wrong. Something in me tells me she wouldn’t really care for a necklace. She’d want something more intangible from me.

Nothing on this list feels right.

5: Get will in order

It feels as if this should be something on a more practical to-do list, like a grocery list or something. But it’s also heavier than that. The words don’t belong anywhere else. Sure as shit, nobody wants to say them in my household.

Except me. There’s a painful silence in every room. It’s like the bloody liver itself is glowing yellow through my skin, and everyone can see it decay, but nobody is talking about it. Everything is still hunky-dory. That’s the funny, ironic thing about dying. You accept your death long before anyone else you know can accept your death.

This would seem like a good first step. Because it’s practical, and in this good, Christian household, we like practicality. I wish I had more things to leave them though, Delaney, and Alexander. Obviously Delaney would get the house, and most of the things in it. Maybe I could give Alexander the car. Sorry for being a shitty dad. Here’s a hunk of metal that might make you life a little easier, but that you’ll probably never use anyway.

4: Have a bonfire

This was the one that surprised me the most, I think. It seems weird, maybe, from the outside, but let me explain.

When I was a teenager, my parents used to host New Year’s Eve bonfires for the neighborhood, which I’d always try to wrangle my way out of in any way possible. I was what you think of when you think of teenagers. Flannel, spiky hair, playing nu metal in the basement as everyone warmed their hands in the backyard. It was a rebellion which only hurt me, which, as I would later realize, is an accurate descriptor for much teenage rebellion.

Something about the sense of community repulsed me. I didn’t want to be part of a group, I didn’t want people’s pity of superficiality, small-talk, I didn’t want to be asked a hundred times what I was planning to do next year, how many children I wanted, whether I’d finally found a girlfriend who’d put up with my shit.

Now I’d do anything to be asked those questions.

3: Send Alexander a birthday card for his twenty-first

If I make it that far. It’s in March, and it’s October now. I’ll write it and get Delaney to snail mail it to him for his birthday if I don’t get to myself.

This is the simpler I was talking about. It doesn’t need to be grand, right? Grand would have been actually having a relationship. Grand would have been putting in the effort. The worst thing, is that now, I can’t actually remember what his adult face looks like. I have to search backwards in time, in my memory, to Delaney holding him in McGee Women’s Hospital, an undented face, peach fuzz, blue-green eyes. I can’t think about it for too long.

2: Have a conversation with Carl

I probably wouldn’t have written this one if I hadn’t looked outside and seen Carl crawl down the street in his usual slow, mechanical, burdened way, like Atlas with a sleeping bag around his shoulders and only one sock. Looking at him was always something I tried avoiding, like everything else that’s sad, festering, desperate in life. But now, even when I look inward, there really isn’t anything else to see.

I think talking to him would be like looking into the eyes of a different type of terminal illness. Not one that eats away at you physically, at your insides, but one of poverty, of prolonged pain. I am reminded of Estragon and Vladimir, thinking of ways to kill themselves as they wait, yet never truly committing to it – all that is left are two desperate, pathetic men, clinging to a worthless life.

But here’s the greatest irony of all: I quite want to die. Not in a suicidal way. More in the who doesn’t want to escape the endless drudgery of middle-class suburban existence, with its taxes and superficiality and mortgages and chronic undersupply of sex because everyone’s too goddamned ashamed way. I’d almost feel disappointed if my doctor told me that I’d actually be fine, and all this was just a big false alarm.

Maybe that’s why I’m finally willing to – I finally want to – look actual pain in the face and talk to it. After all, Carl’s just like every other asshole, trying anything to get away from the crappiness of existence, without enough guts to actually finish it. I feel like a bloody teenager. Like Sam, from The Perks of being a Wallflower that I remember watching in the background as Alexander played it in the living room one afternoon. “There’s so much pain, and I don’t know how to not notice it.”

1: Read ‘The History of Love’ by Nicole Krauss

About three years ago, I walked into our bedroom, with our two single beds side by side, and watched for a few seconds as Delaney, with a novel open in her lap, wept violently. Naturally, I had asked what was wrong, and upon being told it was the contents of the novel that had had this effect, breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” I had said, “that’s it’s not something serious.”

She had looked up at me in anger that I hadn’t understood at the time, likely for lack of trying. But ever since, I’d wanted to read the novel that made her cry like that. It had always been on the backburner. I was never really one to read books, but she always was. After that, she re-read it a number of times. I never would really listen when she told me the things she loved about it.

It’s things like this which make me wish I had more time. I don’t really care that I’ll die, because I don’t want more life for myself. I want more life for others.

Damn. This is a shitty list.