die, and most of us have no idea how or when that will happen. In fact, as each second passes, we’re all in the process of coming closer to our eventual deaths. As the saying goes, none of us will get out of here alive.
I’ll bet right now you’re glad that I’m not your therapist. Who wants to think about this? How much easier it is to become death procrastinators! Many of us take for granted the people we love and the things we find meaningful, only to realize, when our deadline is announced, that we’d been skating by on the project: our lives.
But now Julie needed to grieve all the things she’d have to leave off her list. Unlike older people, who grieve for what they’ll be losing and leaving behind, Julie was grieving for what she would never have—all of the milestones and firsts that people in their thirties just assume will happen. Julie had, as she put it, “a concrete deadline” (“Dead being the operative part of the word,” she said), a deadline so unforgiving that most of what she’d expected would never come to pass.
One day Julie told me that she’d begun to notice how often in casual conversation people talked about the future. I’m going to lose weight. I’m going to start exercising. We’re going to take a vacation this year. In three years, I’ll get that promotion. I’m saving to buy a house. We want to have a second baby in a couple of years. I’ll go to my next reunion in five years.
They plan.
It was hard for Julie to plan a future not knowing how much time there was. What do you do when the difference between a year and ten is enormous?
Then something miraculous happened. Julie’s experimental treatment seemed to be shrinking her tumors. In a matter of weeks, they were almost gone. Her doctors were optimistic—maybe she had longer than they’d thought. Maybe these drugs would work not just now or for a few years but for the long term. There were a lot of maybes. So many maybes that when the tumors disappeared completely, she and Matt began, very tentatively, to become the kind of people who plan.
When Julie examined her bucket list, she and Matt talked about having a baby. Should they have their own child if Julie might not be around for middle school—or, if things went very badly, preschool? Was Matt up for that? What about the child? Was it fair for Julie to become a mother under these circumstances? Or would Julie’s greatest motherly act be the decision not to become one, even if it would be the hardest sacrifice she’d ever make?
Julie and Matt decided that they had to live their lives, even in the face of such uncertainty. If they had learned anything, it was that life is the very definition of uncertainty. What if Julie remained cautious and they didn’t have a baby because they were waiting for the cancer to return—but it never did? Matt assured Julie that he would be a committed father no matter what happened with Julie’s health. He would always be there for their child.
So it was decided. Looking death in the eye would force them to live more fully—not in the future, with some long list of goals, but right now.
Julie kept her bucket list lean: they were going to start their family.
It didn’t matter if they ended up in Italy or Holland or someplace else entirely. They would hop on a plane and see where they landed.
13
How Kids Deal with Grief
Shortly after the breakup, I told Zach, my eight-year-old, the news. We were eating dinner, and I tried to keep it simple: Boyfriend and I had both decided (poetic license) that we weren’t going to be together after all.
His face fell. He looked both surprised and confused. (Welcome to the club! I thought.)
“Why?” he asked. I told him that before two people got married, they needed to figure out if they’d make good partners, not just for the moment, but for the rest of their lives, and even though Boyfriend and I loved each other, both of us realized (again, poetic license) that we wouldn’t and that it was better for us to find other people who would.
This was, basically, the truth—minus some details and plus a few pronoun changes.
“Why?” Zach asked again. “Why wouldn’t you be good partners?” His face was a wrinkle. My heart ached for him.
“Well,” I said. “You know how you used