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It seems that the older I get, the more I understand the way mortality shapes our perception and our willingness to be fully in this world. It’s not something I used to think about directly—too scary—but now I often find myself reading the obituaries, musing on what I would want my own to say: What are the things that will sum up my life? What will stand out? I know this sounds a little morbid, but as Mother Theresa has said: “Each of us is merely a small instrument; all of us, after accomplishing our mission, will disappear.” I wonder what small things people will remember: my dinner parties on the deck? My love for my dog? My weird obsession with cooking magazines? Will they remember my writing, my teaching, or will they remember a particular morning with coffee, a conversation that delved deeper than expected?

We can’t really know. All we can do is keep learning, until the very end, how to live an authentic life. How to be really here. And we can look to others as teachers in this lesson.

My next-door neighbor, Winton Manley, is just such a teacher for me: He’s ninety-eight years old and still drives his own car. I see him in the afternoons, backing out of the driveway, swerving a little wildly sometimes, but he always makes it safely into the street, then putters away in his white Oldsmobile to wherever it is he needs to go. He takes care of things. He takes care of his wife, Dorothy, who is ninety-four and has such bad arthritis now that she can’t move without her walker. “I have to persuade her to get up,” Winton says to me sometimes, when he walks over to admire my petunias or my pansies. “There are good days and there are bad days.”

I remember so clearly a day last summer, when I saw the two of them sitting out on their new deck in the sun. (Winton had it built because Dorothy can’t get out into her garden anymore; here she can admire her pots of geraniums.) The light glinted off their white, white hair. They were just sitting and smiling, not saying a word, and when I finally waved to announce my presence, Dorothy gazed at me as if I were just the most blessed creature on the planet. Her face looked translucent with love, with her expectation that I was exactly what the doctor ordered.

“A beautiful day!” she exclaimed, in a voice that’s grown so wavery in the years I’ve lived next door. I echoed her, speaking as loudly as I could: “Yes, a beautiful day!” And because I was on my way to my own back patio to do who knows what—some reading, some weeding—and because it would have been exhausting to keep talking in that loud, hearty voice, I just waved again and continued on, leaving them sitting there, nodding, enjoying their beautiful day.

And I know that sometime soon, their daughter or grandson will come to my door and tell me that one or both of them has “passed.” And I know I’ll gasp and say, “I’m sorry,” because I am: sorry not only for their passing, and for a daughter’s grief, a grandson’s pain, but truly sorry for all my moments of inattention, my reluctance to keep talking a few minutes longer, my unwillingness to walk the few steps necessary to chat. I’ll remember all the cucumbers and green beans Winton left on my doorstep—bags of them, more than a single woman could ever eat—and I’ll wish, so heartily, that I’d had even a sliver of such abundance to return.

There’s a poem I love by Miguel de Unamuno called “Throw Yourself Like Seed.” In it he exclaims, “Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field….”

When I consider my life as one defining moment after another, I see that I am most fully alive when I “throw myself like seed,” not holding back. I ask myself: What am I holding in reserve? Why? So I take this as my lesson, allowing Winton and Dorothy to be my unexpected teachers: As much as we can, we must never pass up the opportunity to connect, to be fully with each other and with the world, to make each day beautiful for the time we have.
From The Pen and the Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World by Brenda Miller and Holly J. Hughes. Published by Skinner House in 2012, this book is available from the UUA bookstore  or 617-723-4805.

There is an interactive website for The Pen and the Bell at www.penandbell.com.

By Brenda Miller