Yesterday the IRS informed me that they couldn’t accept my return because I am deceased. It was news to me. I better get that memoir finished. I tell everybody they need to write their own story, nobody else can. Nobody else has been there for the whole thing. Your parents are there at the beginning, and some of you are lucky enough to still have them around, but even they don’t know everything. They weren’t there when some of the stuff you did happened, both good and bad. All the secrets, the joys, and the pain. The triumphs and tragedies.
Be honest about who you are. You are not writing a resume, so when you ask yourself the interview question, “Tell me about a failure or challenge and how you overcame it,” be honest with you.
A close family member became an ancestor on Monday after battling a number of health challenges, the same day I wrote Time and Space honoring a friend and former coworker who passed suddenly from a heart attack while walking in the Botanical Gardens with her grandson and his children. Time and space, the trap we fall into by thinking we have more time, creating space that continues to widen until the next event. Too often for me, that event is death. I need to change that…
Lately, I’ve adopted a phrase when somebody says, “It’s good to see you!” My standard response now: “It’s good to be seen and not viewed.” If you see me today, can you say, “I see dead people”?
DMX’s lyrics just popped into my head, “…staring up at the roof of the church.” And one of my favorite rap lyrics from my favorite rapper, “one step kaboom, black suits fill the room.”
I hear those Ethos life insurance commercials, and the guy who lost his dad bluntly says, “He was 63. Had a stroke.” Then he frankly tells us, “You’re going to die, we all are going to die.” He also points out that we don’t like to talk about death in our culture. Truth. Guess who is 63.
I didn’t think I would get the chance to write about my untimely death, announced by the IRS.
So here I am, writing about being dead while being very much alive, at the same time contemplating: what now? Thinking about what my death means to other people. Who knows I’m gone, and even who cares.
Yesterday I heard a clip of a woman talking to her daughter about life using a measuring tape. She cut it at 85 inches, telling her daughter that was the average lifespan. She then cut the measuring tape at 66 inches, her current age, and held up the short piece—what’s left. A strong image, way more inches gone than what is left. My goal is 90, unless the Social Security Administration proves that the IRS is correct.
Maybe I take this chance to reset, reassess, and recognize what’s important. In one of my favorite movies, Clarence tells George Bailey, “You’ve been given a great gift, a chance to see what life would be like without you in it.” I’m getting the unique opportunity to see what my life is like with me still in it, in spite of what the government tries to tell me.
And here’s a thought—what happens if on the third day I find out that I’m not dead anymore?
I won’t post a meme.