A Year to Live
Our lives are being transformed by a viral pandemic that nobody saw coming. For some of us, the spread of COVID-19 might be a catalyst to review our priorities and what we hold dear.
Stephen Levine, who sat at the bedside of thousands of dying people noticed something similar. During people’s dying time, he noticed that many had remarkable transformations: approaching death was a catalyst for heartfelt changes that made their remaining time exceptional and rewarding. Many turned towards life in a way they hadn’t before and Levine wondered whether some of this renewal could be transplanted into the midst of our lives, before death comes knocking.
His enquiry was the genesis for A Year to Live, a book that records the experiences and reflections from a time when he and his wife, Ondrea, spent a year living as if it were their last.
A Year to Live is a guide for taking stock and reviewing life with the intention of growing one’s capacities for compassion and gratitude and forgiveness, and to bring more focus to living mindfully. To that end, it describes practices to help people explore their thoughts and feelings about their death — and to consider what is deathless.
Part of the genius of taking a year to live as if it were one’s last is that healthy people have the luxury of doing so without the challenge and turmoil that accompany dying. Skeptics have said living a year as if it were one’s last in the midst of perfect health is a con.
Maybe it is.
But Levine and others who’ve taken the year-long experiment say it creates an impetus for renewal, and that in the years that followed many have felt enriched and less limited to their old ways and habits.
Levine’s book is more than a guide to cherishing life and making the uncharted journey to death. It is an aide memoire for what he calls ‘the restoration of the heart which occurs when we confront our life and death with mercy and awareness … an opportunity to resolve our denial of death as well as our denial of life in a year-long experiment in healing and revitalization.’
Levine asks, what would you do if you knew your days were numbered by the certainty of impending death?
‘When we ask ourselves this question, myriad possibilities arise. We spin through the full range of our fantasies — from orgies to monasteries and back again. Even on first reflection it becomes painfully obvious that the psychological momentum of our approaching demise propels a heavy wind before it.
‘In this wind tumble the fallen leaves of our abandoned dreams and thwarted melodies. It chills us to the marrow. The question reminds us of how much we have forgotten.
‘A part of us begins to panic at the thought that it hasn’t had quite enough time to leave something valid behind. There have been so few moments when life was all it was cracked up to be; so much that might have been different had the heart not been obstructed by fear.
‘As we begin to see where we have been absent from life, increasing possibilities audition for our approval. The heart suggests that we become more present, that we sharpen our focus. When death, the big wind, blows out our birthday candles, only the wish remains; and only that longing, which deepens our wisdom and compassion.’
Levine offers an antidote to the idea that our last year of life might be spent ticking off the items on our bucket list — meaning our deferred ambitions and pleasures — an idea popularised by the film of the same name. Our remaining time could be spent on our bucket list, but that’s not all it could mean.
I took the year to live experiment seven years ago. The experience both narrowed and expanded my focus and gave me reasons to unpack and process decades of backlog. I was stunned by what I’d deferred and avoided. I was appalled to learn how much pain I was holding and how much energy I was devoting to avoidance — of decisions, pain, memories and people in my life.
I learned that I was living in denial of death and busting through denial helped me make different choices about what I was giving energy to: who I spent time with; who I’d pushed away; who I wanted to thank; and who and what I wanted to let go of.
A year later I formed a group that did ‘a year to live’ together. We met each month to share our insights and the changes we were making, and somewhere in the process I realised there was a black hole of truth at the bottom of my fear of life and death.
Getting to the truth meant clearing the debris and distractions to get to the sinkhole at my core. Everything I’d constructed — my character, my desires, my attachments, my preoccupations — were in the way.
Most importantly, I was in the way. Ego was plugging the hole, and when I recognised this I went into freefall. Like young Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, I went tumbling down the rabbit hole.
This is an extract from Dan Gaffney’s new book and podcast series, ‘Journey Home — Essays on Living and Dying’, published in November 2019.
