Forty Years On

Today marks 40 years since the day I probably should have died.

Am I living on borrowed time? Sometimes I think so. And perhaps that’s why I am so profoundly uncomfortable whenever that reading about the talents comes up in the lectionary at church. Because I can’t be said to have spent that time well. I have been, I think, rather like that servant who buries the one talent because he’s so afraid of what the master will do to him if he loses it.

I think about that year a lot. So many awful things happened that year – my father got cancer, my mother broke her hip, I got mono, and a couple of months later, I was hit by a truck (April 4th, 1980).

And then my father left. My mother kicked him out, I suppose, in a drunken rage, unable to tolerate his philandering any longer – that was my perception at the time, though they are both dead now and it was forty years ago – who knows? But it still feels like he left me.

And I have spent 40 years trying not to take up space, make any kind of noise, or lose that talent. Just in case what? Someone comes looking for it? Death finds my name down the cushions of his couch, lost for 40 years after a wild night playing Trivial Pursuit with the guys?

I have not lived a life worth the saving, frankly. And I have not even had pleasure to make it worth the wasting. People have died and I have thought, “take me instead – I could be better spared.” But I have people who love me and whom I love and so I live for them.

We are now in the midst of a pandemic and people are dying. People of whom we will say, “She should have died hereafter.”

I do what I can, what I am told to do. What I do not do, what I try not to do, is worry. I don’t watch the news. I take information from one or two sources that I trust and I try not to pass information on to others, just as I try not to pass my germs. It may be that spreading false information will kill people as surely as this virus does. There are certainly people out there taking advantage of those who are terrified and seeking any action that may improve their odds – offering quackery that may actually put a person at risk.

I don’t think anyone will come out of this untouched. We will not be going back to life as we knew it three months ago. When my sister got cancer, she told one of her doctors that she just wanted to go back to her old life. He reminded her that her old life included the cancer that was killing her. So we should remember that there is no going back. We really should figure out where we buried that talent, dig it up, and invest in the new world that’s entrusted to us.

We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.

Hamlet – Act V, scene ii