I used to set a timer

for 25 minutes every day to do a counting meditation. The timer was one of those cheap little plastic deals and it died one day with a faint boop boop before my meditation had ended. The display showed just a few of the digital lines available for forming its numbers, and if you picture a squared-off

o no

that’s what I saw on the timer’s face as it faded out.

We only know how close death is when it’s been announcing itself for a while, usually. Terminal illness that’s arriving at the terminal, or a life that’s grown blessedly, improbably long. Otherwise it’s a surprise.

How long life will or won’t be

I have an invisible balloon bag representing the amount of life I wager I have left tied with my imagination to my being every day. The balloon bag is either inflating to its full expression, or deflating life-force-wise, or both. I occasionally try and feel into the space I have to move around in that bag with my peripheral feel-o-vision. I try not to notice that I’m doing this and I know that whatever I’m estimating is wrong.

The phrase “World War III” is flying around with a new frequency. It’s no longer the example of something so farfetched as to be nearly impossible, something you could say as a joke. Some say we’ve been in this war for many years already, unbeknownst to most of us, that we rolled into that horrible lake when Putin invaded Ukraine in 2014, or when Trump was installed.

I’m not trying to talk about war, or even death, exactly.

Preciousness, loss, time

I saw a young man on TV when we were watching “Portrait Artist of the Year” who reminded me of my dad. He had my dad’s brow, some of the same tenderness in his face. I was whomped with a feeling of loss but not of the dad I knew. It was the young Johnny Kunz, whom I’d never known, that I missed. I didn’t know him and I wouldn’t know him. I could have asked ten thousand more questions when he was here but I didn’t know I should and there was also an electric fence up around some radioactive material in him, or between us, or both, that I would have been scared to breach.

Was he a lonely young man? Was he overrun by sadness? Was he happy, too? What made him happy? What did he dream of? What was his solace? Too late, the ship has sailed, he’s on the other shore.

The volume of unknown amount in the invisible bag of life I have. What I know is that I feel urgency to make the most of the space. I want to run from one end to the other in there, see everything in range, grab everyone I run across, ask overly charged questions. I want the ink I write with to be brighter and I want to write so hard I carve the page, and I want to write the right thing, and I worry I won’t know what that is in time. I will not have done right by all the people I wanted to do right by in the way I wanted do right by them. I will not have loved people as hard as I wanted to. That’s a lock. And I have X amount of time to make peace with that and love how I can and try for everything I want to try for in this body.

I will partially explain this lumpy, oddball cake on a towel.

My mom and I had a reading with a medium a year or so after my dad died. I’d taken up cake-baking like a lunatic and baked the cake up there on my dad’s birthday, a few months before we had the reading. You may have questions about what’s going on with this thing, design-wise. Never mind. What is interesting is what my dad said, his opener, according to the medium.

He said, “I see life is still sweet.”

That was him. She couldn’t have made up his whole personality and sense of humor. That was him.

He went on to say that he’d been delighted to find out that consciousness continued after death, just as he’d suspected, and he was having all kinds of fun going to different lectures and classes wherever he was.

I can’t remember what else he said.

All I knew was that if I had been afraid of death before that, I stopped.

Death is fine. Death is fine. For me, death is fine. I think it’ll be fun.

It’s all of this, all of you. You understand.

When I think about you, and your bag, and the amount of time you have left, I’m clear that the right attitude towards our limits is total kindness. You’re doing your best and you’re doing beautifully. If you could be doing any better, you would be. This is right. I know it. The life you get on the page, your final product in its exact stage when death signs your name for you, will be a perfect expression of what wanted to express itself. Nobody ends up a poem that needs rewriting. Our worst, most destructive people may be sad and awful poems in the end but a sad and awful poem is still a proper poem of the Earth and will be admitted into the collection.