The sun sets so it can rise again

I stood in the entryway to our family room where some family and friends had gathered to celebrate The Masters Golf Tournament, and to send my eldest daughter off to Prom.

It was a full day: Egg salad, Azalea drinks, hairspray, glitter, golf and golden-hour pre-prom photoshoots, but most of all it was spent with the feeling of stories being told for the first time now and another time somewhere else by someone else later. The noise of ab-muscle-soreness-inducing-laughter and constant conversation created a cacophony of nostalgia and novelty.

It was intoxicating.

You’ve felt that right? That feeling of a memory being created before you’ve even had time to add it to your memory. Of a meal that’s so good you can’t imagine food tasting better? Or a movie you know you’ll be telling someone about before it’s even over? Ya. It was that.

Then, there’s another feeling.

If you’re a parent and you’ve taken your kid to a bouncehouse or a show or something they wanted to go to really bad — you’ve probably also felt it from the other side of the same coin.

I remember taking my daughters to an indoor playhouse when they were 5 and 3 and I made the newly single-dad mistake of just abruptly walking up to them both and saying, “okay, it’s time to go.”

Cue the meltdown. It wasn’t Walmart-meltdown-level, but you get the picture.

Now age those same kids and that Dad some 13+ years into a 46-year-old father with a full family and a fuller heart.

I knew how precious it was to get family and friends into one house to celebrate anything and here it was, in my hands. At the same time I felt the euphoria of the moment, I also thought about how this moment was going to end and I wanted to drop on the floor and flail about. I knew how my kids felt all those years ago.

I wanted to pause time like I was Zach from Saved by the Bell and just stand in slack-jawed appreciation at this life and the people who chose to spend it near me.

I was [am] so lucky.

And then I remembered the Ben Sasse podcast I listened to and thought- how selfish of me.

This moment had to end because I knew it was a moment. I knew how much I loved these people, but when you’re knee-deep in pimento cheese, looking through tear-filled eyes at your daughter on the preface of adulthood, you can’t help thinking that for this to end was a death in itself.

But what if what we’re talking about was actually death itself.

Try telling Ben Sasse, the former Nebraska Senator, whose body is ravaged with tumors from pancreatic cancer and skin that won’t repair from cutting-edge new drugs, to “live like you are dying” and since he’s from Nebraska, I bet he’d say it’s a pretty good song. But, it is actually more than a meaningful song, because he is in fact doing just that. He has been given a terminal diagnosis and telling his story to anyone who will listen.

Also, “live like you are dying” is a lyric from a song by Tim McGraw of the same name, whose own dad Tug showed him what battling cancer looked like.

And I had myself known of that lyric and seen it first hand. But this deep dive into the paradoxes of all paradoxes (both/and by another name) isn’t about 90’s Country music lyrics. It’s about both life and death and it starts with the most egotistical subject of all- myself.

I can remember sitting on a couch. I was writing a letter to my mom but my hands were stuck trying to write the words, “I don’t want the party to end”. Although, it had nothing to do with parties, it was that I didn’t want her to die. I was too lucky to have her as my mother and it was criminal to think it might have to end. Death was a thief and a savant in a black robe all at once. Take your scythe and your cancer “and go f yourself”.

That’s what I wanted to write but couldn’t find the courage. My anger and my fear weren’t directed at her or death.

They were directed at me.

I had acted like a child who threw himself on the floor of a good time. Just weeks before, after weeks of trips to the hospital and standing steadfastly by my Father and Mother as she learned about the cancer that was tearing through her body, I just up and left. Left college. Left home. Left my Mother. I went to stay on a friend’s couch in Kansas City.

I sat through weeks with the deafening noise of possibly losing one of the most important people in your life far before their time.

And so I sat there, trying to write a “Dear Momma...” type letter and nothing moved.

It’s taken me 25+ years, and this article to try and make sense of why I ran and why the words escaped me.

One thing I should tell you before I go any further.

She lived.

She’s 67+ now. She’s beaten cancer twice. The funeral I was rehearsing on a couch in Kansas City never happened. Which, you’d think, would mean the running didn’t matter, that I was haunted by a ghost who turned out to be bedsheet. But that’s not how it works I’ve learned.

I know the arc of that 21-year-old kid on the couch, and I’ve been carrying him around with me ever since. He’s the reason I can’t stand in a doorway at a prom party without also standing in a hospital waiting room. He’s the reason every beautiful thing comes with a countdown attached.

I haven’t lost her but I’ve practiced losing her in the back of my mind for 25 years. It’s also extended to my children, my partner (I’m 45+ so Girlfriend feels weird to say), my Father, siblings, nephews and nieces, our amazing dog, and so many others I’m so grateful to know and call family and frineds.

And that creates a life of both a constant fear of it all ending and zero fear at all. So, what are we to do?

But first, back to Sasse.

If you’ve listened to him on Ross Douthat’s podcast or his own Not Dead Yet Podcast, you know what I mean when I say he’s doing something most people won’t do. He’s not “performing” his death. He’s not dressing it up. He’s not hiding behind faith talk or humor, though he uses plenty of both. He’s letting you see it. The bleeding face. The morphine. The tumors.

He’s fully in touch with reality and he’s purposefully not glossing it over. He knows why he’s out in public but it’s not because he’s wracking up podcast sponsorship deals. No, he’s doing it for a wife, Melissa, he calls his best friend of 33 years, two grown daughters, and a 14-year-old son named Augustin — but they call him Breck because Augustin is too heavy a name to yell at a ballgame. Sasse doesn’t want to leave any of them. He also knows he’s going to.

And it’s in that tension of his understanding he’ll leave his family behind and make an impact on so doing so that he makes his mark.

He was also most recently on a segment on ‘60 minutes’ and the same authenticity, vulnerability, bravery, and audacity was on display. The reaction on social media and elsewhere tells me others also see the same.

In his Douthat Podcast appearance, there’s a Tim Keller line Sasse quotes — Keller was a Presbyterian pastor in Manhattan who also died of pancreatic cancer a few years back - “I hate pancreatic cancer. I would never wish it on anyone. But I would never want to go back to a time in my life where I didn’t know the prayer of pancreatic cancer.” To which Sasse reacts to this quote with his own: “[Sasse himself now] knows much more the truth of my finitude than I ever let myself believe in the past.”

Read that twice. Because that’s the thing. That’s the whole thing.

You don’t un-learn what dying teaches you. And most of us will do almost anything to avoid being in a position to learn it in the first place- but he weighs deep into that end of the existential pool by acknowledging he never really knew what life (and his family and faith) meant.

If you’ve ever sat near death — really sat near it, in a hospital room or on a front porch or at a phone call that changes your week — you know there’s a line people cross. On one side, everyone’s still performing. On the other side, nobody’s performing anymore. Sasse is on the other side of that line, and he’s willing to let the rest of us see what it looks like from over there.

But how do we get over there without having to have our skin bleed off from cutting edge new tumor-reducing cancer fighting pharmaceuticals?

The research on grief specifically, the Dual Process Model from psychologists Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut — says healthy grieving isn’t a straight line. It’s an oscillation. You lean into the loss, and then you lean back toward the rest of your life. You feel the weight of it, and then you take a break from the weight of it. You cry, and then you laugh at a friend’s dumb joke two hours later, and then you cry again that night when you’re alone. Both sides are necessary.

Neither side by itself gets you through.

I’m emphatically saying first - there is no one way to grieve. No right way. No wrong way. Only the way those who do and will grieve, grieve. There is also research that shows, people who only grieve get stuck and people who only avoid grief get stuck too. The health is in the moving between.

There’s also a term: Anticipatory grief. Grieving someone before they’re gone. Grieving the ending while you’re still inside the moment. The psychologist Pauline Boss calls a version of this ambiguous loss — the person is still here, but they might be leaving, and the part of you that loves them is trying to process both realities at once. She says it’s harder than regular grief because there’s no closure to organize around. The person is present and possibly-gone at the same time.

That last part is what nobody prepares you for. Your body doesn’t run the probabilities, it just prepares for the worst thing on the list. And once it prepares, it doesn’t fully un-prepare.

What I see in Sasse- he’s in the deep end and he’s making jokes about his looks. He’s weeping with Ross Douthat and two seconds later ribbing him about opening up a can of pansy ass. He is anticipating his own grief, out loud, in public, all while he is still alive. He is the embodiment of this oscillation.

Viktor Frankl, a Psychologist and Holocaust Survivor, said if we were immortal, we would procrastinate forever. Meaning is created by the limit. The end creates movement. This finitude creates imperative.

You don’t get the moment without the ending.

And then there’s my mom.

Who is, as I’m writing this, very much alive. Two cancers survived. One grandchild headed to prom, and several others thriving.

I’ve spent 25 years imagining what it would be like to lose her, so I asked her what it was like to almost be lost.

“Almost not surprised” she said.

Death isn’t something you get to bargain with but for my Mother, she attempted to. Some 24 years earlier when she was 21 years old. Imagine that.

She grew up the eldest of three kids to my Grandparents, Charles and Jean. She’ll admit that she’s a farm kid at heart despite leaving the farm at a fairly young-ish age. But what she doesn’t like to admit is how much death surrounded her as a kid first, then young adult, adult and on.

“I had my first biopsy when I was 21 years old, back then you stayed overnight in the hospital to wait for the results.” At that age, the same age I side-stepped reality, she was stuck with waiting overnight to find out if she’d have to try and side-step life and death.

She had dealt with her own Grandmother’s Breast Cancer fight and at the same time she was awaiting her results, in fact her Grandmother was going through chemotherapy.

So to her cancer = death.

“I bargained with God, I was angry, why did this happen to me”.

So many emotions for someone that age but thankfully she found out then that she was cancer free only to watch as she lost her Grandmother, preceded by her other set of Grandparents some 9 years earlier, and a year later — her brother.

“Life always looked a little different for me. I know death. Life is precious, a sunset and a sunrise means a lot to me.”

She is and has been one of the first “crunchy” moms I knew before that was a term. And for her, when she reads this, the term is a positive one on balance. It means caring a lot about your health. For her, it’s a means to an end we all want her to wait to see. For her, it’s pretty simple really.

“Feel the grass beneath your feet, smell the dirt, hold your kids, laugh with your family, make some sourdough bread, leave a legacy and most of all — see both the sunrise and feel the sunset.”

So. Why all this?

What I can say is this. When it came to that moment all those years ago, I think I ran because I thought I had to pick one or another. Stay and slog it out or go quietly. I picked avoidance because grief alone was going to drown me, and at 21 I didn’t know there was a third option. Feel it. And keep living. Oscillate. Back and forth. For the rest of your life. On purpose.

This article, the podcast with Sasse, and the conversations with my mom aren’t about the part of life & death you’d normally shrug off as “eh, what can you do” or “it comes for all of us”, or “the only certain things in this world are ‘Death and Taxes”. No, that’s a constant background noise you learn to live with once you realize the boogeyman is no longer under your bed.

This is about life- now. Your life now. Your friends, enemies, family, loved ones, teacher, dog, cat, pet, wife, husband, partner, stranger, coworker, boss, ex, daughter, son, stepson, stepdad. All of us. All of ours.

From the research, from my mother, from Ben Sasse, from the people you know or have lost or are about to, or just you — it takes really sitting with the end to understand the value of life. The value of today.

Of making decisions for both today AND tomorrow.

What is the formula to living life if not realizing life is precious because it will all end? Oscillating from one reality to the next doesn’t have to be either traumatic or flippant. Either fearful or triumphant. Either humbling or empowering. It can and usually is both.

That’s where the meaning is.

In the alchemy of the both/and you emerge with information and confidence about where to go next.

I learned after the first time my eldest daughter threw that tantrum all those years ago how to handle any potential future ones.

The next time we went to the “Fun Zone”, after what felt like 10 hours, but was more than likely barely 2hrs), I realized I needed to avoid another “scene”. No rolling around on the ground for this family.

I built up the courage, told myself “I got this, you’re the boss” and walked over to my precious, playing daughters and said:

Yes, sadly, our amazing fun time here at this very humid indoor bouncehouse filled with many (many) other screaming kids will have to end, maybe in 30 minutes, maybe in 15…

But for now…

….and till we leave….

….keep playing.