Part 4 of 10

26:00

"Looking back, I think I knew I was dying long before they found the tumors. After our daughter was born, I began to feel the press of time in a way I never had."

"All new parents feel that."

"This wasn't about having enough time, about being busy. This was about time running out, spilling away. I spent every minute I could with my wife and daughter, and I tried to be really there, in the moment. I thought perhaps I was just growing up. It wasn't until later I realized this was a kind of premonition. I was savoring life, because at some level I knew it was sliding away from me. The more I savored, or maybe just the more I paid attention, the more aware I became of time marching away. It made me impatient.

"I found it increasingly difficult to bear the common pettiness and politics at my work. I grew a temper, which I'd never had. At first people actually found it entertaining and even encouraged it. My office was filled with passive-aggressive types, conflict-avoiders. As long as I was doing their confronting for them, they loved me for it. But it didn't take long for me to turn on everyone.

"Waiting in lines and in traffic was unbearable. I found myself baffled by people who would spend minutes arguing with a cashier over a dollar or two. Lives spent so, including my own before all this, now seemed distant and incomprehensible...and tragic. Couldn't they see how time spilled through their fingers as they grasped and growled at each other?

"I began to watch the elderly. I spent time on them. Not a lot. Little things. I looked them in the eye as I held a door or lifted a bag. They seemed to appreciate just being noticed. There were some who were impatient and angry like me, but most had a pace about them that I wanted to understand. I developed relationships with several of our older neighbors. It suited my wife because we were living far from home and these surrogate grandparents plugged, for a time, the familial holes that distance made.

"Everyone thought I was wonderful, but I can tell you I was mostly driven by this strange new kinship I'd found with people who seemed to understand time. Of course I didn't know that's what was happening while it was happening. I couldn't have corrected anyone's perception of me if I'd wanted to because I didn't understand it myself. I was beginning to think I was pretty wonderful myself.

"Then I turned thirty. My life so far hadn't been terribly introspective, but I'd always understood that humans in general were full of shortcomings and that I was not unique. It made me a nice guy, this abstract confession to myself that I had the power to cause pain and that I probably had done so along the way. But now I was starting to come up with concrete examples of my...sins. Memories of old girlfriends came to mind, and I'd see suddenly how careless I'd been with their hearts, how selfish. I had a strong desire to contact them, to apologize.

"I managed to find two of them. One was an art professor at a college in Louisiana, and the other had earned a doctorate and was working as a medical writer at Johns Hopkins. They had lives, and memories too I'm sure. In the end, I did nothing. I didn't think my wife would understand, and I felt my apology, after all these years, would be selfish too. If I now understood the pain I'd caused, it didn't change anything. They'd moved on years ago. Maybe they still carried something of it with them. A memory that could end a smile. A pause when they looked through a window at the rain. But what pride to think that I could ease some pain of theirs, to assume they hadn't got past my adolescent blunders, to presume they needed me to do this for them.

"That's the real cost of sin, that after a time it simply can't be forgiven or forgotten. It has to become just a part of you, and accepted. And so I spent my time with my wife and daughter with even more vigor, as penance.

"Do you see? Do you see how I was getting things in order? I didn't, but at some level I understood it. When my wife discovered the mole on my back, it wasn't fear that I felt. The mole was the puzzle piece that made all the others fit, and that's when I knew. That's when I understood what was happening. I didn't need the doctors to tell me what was happening, though I went through the motions. I didn't need the hope that tests and treatments could provide. I was reading my life like a farmer reads the weather. The time was ripe.

"An initial test showed it was malignant. The doctor said that sometimes the immune system can beat the cancer and sometimes it can't. He wanted to remove some tissue to see if the cancer had spread. I could've told him what he'd find, but I knew no one else would believe it until they cut me open and examined me from the inside out. My own skin was killing me and I was powerless to stop it. I saw other patients in various stages of treatment during my visits. They looked terrible, and I knew the therapy and recovery would wreck me. And I knew it wouldn't work.

"I didn't want my daughter to remember me like that. I drove home along the cliffs one night and was turning all this over in my head as I approached the first of several hairpin turns. I moved my foot to brake but paused with it just above the pedal. And just like that, I ended it."