Making The Most Of Finite Time

They had a memorial service for Alan Marks the other day. Several hundred people showed up, one of them being Alan Marks.

His doctors say the 58-year-old stockbroker from Potomac, Md., is dying of an aggressive cancer. They measure his life expectancy in days.

Marks, as you might expect, would rather live. Would rather the future was still unknown country, rolling toward horizons too far to see. Instead, it has become a space as closed and constricted as a phone booth.

Dead within days, say the doctors. Dead within days.

So what to do with the little bit of future he has left? Marks decided to throw a party - to plan and attend his own memorial. It was, by all accounts, an amazing affair. Friends, family, clients and co-workers packed a chapel. Marks, still hale and hearty, worked the room, greeting his guests. The speakers told tales about him, poked gentle fun at the foibles of a lifetime. People cried. But they laughed, too.

We used to sing of something like this years ago, when I was a child in church. “Give me my flowers,” went the hymn, “while I am yet living.” In other words, don’t wait until I’m lying there cold as stone to lift my praises and speak your love. Do it now, while living ears can still hear.

Marks has certainly suffered a devastating blow. Yet is it too fanciful to suggest that, in some sense, he has also been given a great gift? Or that in organizing his living wake, he passed that gift on to others?

We live, so many of us, under the illusion of forever, the sense that there will always be enough time to say the unsaid things, voice the unvoiced feelings, do the great thing we’ve always meant to do. We leave so much unresolved. And why not? What’s the hurry? There’s always another dawn.

Until the day there is not.

Until the day accident or illness takes all the dawns away.

Nobody wants to hear that, of course. We survive by denial, by pretending that the day without a dawn isn’t marching closer all the time. When the mirror begins to say otherwise, we turn to surgeon’s knives and miracle pills, pound our bodies through harsh regimens of exercise. We retreat to illusion. Yet even the best illusion doesn’t take so much as half a step off that relentless march.

Nothing can.

Maybe if we understood that, we would have some little part of what Alan Marks does. Not peace, perhaps, but a certain deep grace.

Barring some unforeseen happenstance, he knows when he’s going to die. I’m sure that knowledge has brought him fear, caused him weeping and sadness. But it’s also taught him to savor time, to see the infinity within the moment.

The point is not, as the cliche would have it, that one ought to stop and smell the roses. Rather, it’s that one must grasp an essential truth: Life draws its sweet urgency precisely from the fact that it is as evanescent as soap bubbles, ephemeral as spring. Temporary.

So the question becomes, how do we spend the life we have? How much of it do we give over to ancient wounds and angry grudges, petty hatreds and limiting fears? And how much will be assigned instead to ice cream and laughter, to the company of children and service to others?

I’m now four-fifths as old as my father was when he died and I find that those questions assume increasing importance every year. Not because I fear death, but because I cherish life.

Ultimately, there’s no difference between me and Alan Marks. He’s just had his denial stripped away, lost his illusions. But we both - we all - face the question of finite time.

And I find myself moved by the answer this man chose. In his last days, he threw himself a party. Reached past denial and discovered opportunity. Found joy in the valley of the shadow of death.

It’s an example to inspire a healthy-bodied soul.

What will we do with the dawn?

xxxx