"Six Months To Live"

Going Through Old Notebooks Part 31: "You’re supposed to ask yourself, what would I do? How would I live, if I had just six months, or a year, but wasn’t going to change anything major..."

Photo by Milamai.

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Once, in my early twenties, I decided to pretend I only had six months to live. I don’t mean publicly. I never told a soul or said it aloud to anyone. I wanted to see what it would feel like to live that way, to remind myself of the exercise, as I was driving, say, one morning with my sunglasses on.

You only have six months to live—what are you going to do with yourself?

I was twenty-one, and doing a lot of Buddhist meditation. I’d read the book A Year To Live by Stephen Levine, and figured I would give it a try. I’m not sure why I decided on six months instead of a year, but a year felt like a long time then, the way it does to children; maybe I was impatient. You’re supposed to ask yourself, what would I do? How would I live, if I had just six months, or a year, but wasn’t going to change anything major? Often, all it meant was that I took off my sunglasses and looked around.

It was summer. I was working as a nanny, and the days were very long. We blew bubbles and did craft projects. Nothing very dramatic happened. Mostly I think I just paid attention. I made my art. I went to dance classes. I went to the beach and held my face to the sunlight. I tried to wake up and taste the food I was eating, to really be with the people I was with.

When I was a child, a friend of mine and I used to play for hours unsupervised behind her house in the tall green grass along the creek that ran through town— through all the towns, and then the hills, and finally to the ocean. In her patch of creek in the springtime, we used to hunt for frogs. The tiny, light green frogs would hide there in the wet grass, the color of the grass itself, with only their movement to give them away. Some of them were smaller than our fingerprints.

You would think that we were eating them, how avidly we hunted in the bright green of the creekside. We just wanted to see them, to catch them and look at them, to put them in jars with some wood sorrel and a bit of water, as many as possible. We were monsters in our innocence, spurred on by fascination, enraptured by the very things that we no doubt terrified and harmed. Some of the frogs found their way into terrariums, but others—I don’t know. I can’t remember the point, just the hunt, and the cold clean water, and the grass. I remember what it did to me, for hours afterwards, my instincts sharpened, jumping at every shifting leaf on the sidewalk when we went into town afterwards to get ice cream.

The idea with pretending you have only six months to live, or a year, is, of course, that you never know. The bus or the aneurysm or the heart attack—they can come at any time. Sometimes there’s a bad decision involved, those slippery stairs at night, or the friend who’s had a few drinks behind the wheel. Other times it’s nothing to do with you. You’re checking the soccer scores and then, in the next moment, gone.

As for my six-month experiment, it’s possible that I simply forgot about it, the way we usually do. We forget that we are mortal. I don’t remember marking the end with some metaphorical demise, or a pretend disaster averted, or whatever. I would forget, and then remember, and take my sunglasses off, and then I would forget again.

To the frogs, I’m sure, we were the catastrophe. They were so small and soft and fascinating. Are they still there, I wonder? In the great warming and silencing and browning that is happening all around us, is there space, still, for those little green frogs?

When I remembered to be alive, it was sometimes like dancing, or like some miracle of the body that I’d never achieved with the body itself. There was a feeling like cliffs under bright sun and sea spray, or that place where the green of a coastal trail finally meets the sand, and a spring runs down to the beach, with water that has traveled however far it has traveled that can now, finally, and like a poem, dissolve into the waves.

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This post was adapted from a notebook entry written in 2023.

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