What would you do differently if you remembered time runs out?
My dad cuddling my son, many years ago.
TL/DR:
Remembering that time runs out helps you make the hard choices now, reducing future regret.
Avoidance often hides something deeper. The task you keep putting off might not be about the task at all.
Small acts carry real weight: answer the phone call, invite the friend to lunch, start the hobby you keep delaying.
Reflect on what someone you've lost taught you about your spending time on the stuff that matters, to you. Because tomorrow is never guaranteed.
The Whole Shebang:
My knives are in dire need a good sharpening. And I’ve been procrastinating. For months. And to the level at which my 17 year old (our resident watermelon-chopper) has been on my case about it.
And it’s not like I couldn’t make it happen. I have a whet stone (that my dad gifted me), I have the skill (because my dad taught me), and I can make the time. And, even if I didn’t have any of those things, I could certainly take them to a knife sharpener to do it for me.
And yet, my knives remain dull. (Except for the one I did finally sharpen because it’s very dangerous to cut a watermelon with a dull chef’s knife, and I’d like my kiddo to keep his fingers. See above.)
Why?
Well, it’s been 17 months since I lost my Dad and that loss is VERY present in my life. Some days it’s a vague feeling of loss. Other times, it’s very specific. Case in point: even though I’ve got the tools and the skills to make my knives sharp again, I’ve haven’t done it because my dad always did it for me when he visited.
And sharpening those knives myself is a reminder that he’s really, really gone.
And, with father’s day on the horizon, my feeds have been filled with lots of father’s day gift ideas, which are, you know, useless to me at this point.
And I know I’m not the only one feeling slightly triggered by those ads, “helpful” round ups, and posts. Because by my age, 63% of folks in the US have lost at least 1 parent (and many more, someone very close), I’m willing to bet that you might also have suffered some deep losses that are still very present for you.
So, in honor of father’s day, I want to tell you a little about my dad and what I learned from him (aside from knife sharpening).
Sharing him with you is a (fathers’s day) gift I can give to myself, and by extension, you.
So, how the heck can stories about MY dad, be a gift to YOU?
Well, because my dad was a guy who put his time where his mouth is; he spent his time doing things that were important and meaningful and that he enjoyed, even if others may have found him, or his deep interests, a little strange at times.
My dad was a lot of things, but most of all he was a constant presence in my life, from some of my earliest memories of being zipped inside his coat to keep warm on summer beach vacations on the Oregon coast (where no one really goes in the water because it’s so damn cold) to the fact that up until he couldn’t, he played chess on Sundays with my youngest, and played Go with my oldest, whenever their schedules aligned.
My dad wasn't super effusive with his language around love, but the fact that he loved me deeply was never in question, because he showed me with how he spent his time.
It was my dad who read to me every night, aloud, with funny voices.
It was my dad who stayed up all night with me when I was sick, reading to me aloud, on the bathroom floor, when I was puking so much I needed to be close to the toilet at all times.
It was my dad who took me along on Saturday errands (surely, in retrospect, to give my mom some breathing room). We’d go grocery shopping, and he’d buy me treats. We’d stop at “Silver Platters”, the CD store he loved, and he’d get me set up listening to music while he perused the stacks. We’d go to Crossroads (a local strip mall) and get lunch (dosas mostly) after spending who knows how long at “Half Price Books”, where he’d always let me get whatever I wanted because reading was his “special interest”.
It was my dad who met me at a random gas station one night when I was 16, having gotten turned around while driving home from a babysitting gig in the impenetrable fog, in the time before cell phones.
It was my dad who chaperoned my 16th birthday party, on Cameno Island, at a friend’s house, full of teenagers, doing god knows what (just kidding, I do know), just to make sure we were safe, but not interfering at all.
It was my dad who dropped me off in NYC for college, walking around Washington Square Park with me, and buying me a small painting I still have in my house today.
It was my dad who sent me manila envelopes of articles that he’d cut out of the various newspapers and magazines, with handwritten notes about why he thought I’d like them, until the internet became his primary source of information, after which I got MANY (like upwards of 10 a week) emails from him forwarding stuff he thought I’d like.
(I will say, I did, indeed, need to batch-process those emails! The internet, made it a little too easy for him to share; I think I preferred the old days, but I digress.)
It was my dad who drove with me to Portland, after I left New York at 23, and got us a hotel and took me out to dinner while I was interviewing for jobs for which I would receive offers and yet decide not to take, based only on gut feeling.
And he never gave me crap about those decisions.
And when I didn't end up moving to Portland, but to San Francisco instead, it was my dad who rented a U-haul and drove me 15 hours to San Francisco to move me in, on Father’s day, no less.
And when I was lonely in San Francisco, those first few weeks before I had friends, before I met my husband, before I had a real job, it was my whoALWAYS picked up the phone, no matter what he was doing.
In fact, my sister and I were just joking the other day about this; here are some reals ways my dad has picked up the phone:
“Hi, I’m on a ladder, but what do you need?”
“Hi, my flight just took off so it might cut off, but, what’s going on?”
“Hi, I’m at a dinner party, what’s up"?”
Reading this, you might be tempted to think that all of his time was devoted to his daughters, his family. But that wouldn’t be true, because he also made time for his (many) hobbies and interests (and let’s not forget, he had a full time job for most of his adult life). He was:
A skilled craftsman and woodworker (my bedside tables were made by him)
A prolific gardener (oodles of tomatoes, figs, raspberries, quince, etc.)
A handyman extraordinaire with the ability to fix or build whatever was required (at his memorial, a friend bought, not one, but two literal props to accompany her eulogy including some risers my dad had made for her bed, with perfect cutouts for the moulding on the wall)
A voracious reader (evidenced by the 1000s books, mostly non-fiction, lining most walls in the house, and piled up on the floor)
A curious listener (He instilled in me a love of the Beatles, Bob Marley, and Don McClean’s “American Pie”. To the end, he maintained a perfectly organized collection of 1000s of CDs, a music lover with wide-ranging tastes. Gregorian chants to the Eurythmics, Dylan to Enya, to Tracy Chapman to the Stones.
A curiosity driven rabbit-hole seeker (obsessive not only about music and books, but many subjects, in succession: photography, bamboo, figs, rugs chess sets, just to name a few)
He was generous with his time. Both towards others, and towards himself.
His diagnosis about 2.5 years ago, of terminal brain cancer, was a blow to us all, most of all him.
Because he wasn’t ready to stop living.
In fact, we used to joke that he’d die sometime in his late nineties falling off a ladder or the roof, because he was never going to hire someone to clean the gutters.
As it is, we got him for a whole lot less time that we expected.
And in the last year of his life, I got to test my own ideals about time by making sure that I visited as often as I could, and called more often than that.
And he became even more committed to living what little time he had left in service of his own goals and values.
And I know that no one likes to think, or talk, about death.
But it’s important to do so because being reminded of the fact that time is limited, for you, and for me, is one way that we can make better decisions about how we want to use our time in the future.
I don’t know about you, but I aim to live a life of few regrets. And how your spend your time is directly tied to that.
Thinking about death (your own, specifically) can help you to make the choices that feel hard in the moment, but that will reduce regrets.
So:
Answer that phone call, even if you’ve got a to-do list a mile long.
Invite a friend you haven’t seen in too long to lunch.
Start up that hobby you’ve been interested in taking up for years but haven’t felt like you’ve had the time for.
Read the first page of the novel that’s been on your bedside table for months.
And I’d invite you to consider taking a few moments to reflect on, or revisit, what you learned from someone you’ve lost, about how to spend your time in service of a meaningful life, whatever that means to you.
Because time, well, it’s ticking. For all of us.
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