End Date
reckoning with the fact that we all have an expiration date
A small, laminated card, about the size of a playing card, sits on my table. I look at it, not sure what to do with it, as always happens with the cards they hand out at funerals. I hold it in my hands, looking at the short prayer on the front and then I turn it over and there’s a picture of my cousin. She facing away from me, but has her head turned back toward me. She’s smiling, of course. She was always smiling.
Underneath her picture are two dates. Her date of birth and then 10/12/20. The finalization of that hits me and I stare at the date incredulously. That’s it. She does not exist after that date. And it strikes me, the way it does when I think of these things — we all have an end date.
There’s no getting around it, we’re going to die. It’s something I think about often, usually at 3am when my brain likes to go over all they myriad ways I may meet death. Some day, I am not going to be alive anymore. I’ll be gone, just another person to remember in vague terms as time goes on. Eventually people will forget my voice, and forget what color my eyes were and forget how I laughed at inappropriate jokes. Maybe they’ll have a laminated card they’ll come across when cleaning out their junk drawer and my end date will be on that card and they’ll stop for a minute and remember me before throwing the card in the garbage. Circle of life.
I think about my parents, in their early 80s now, and I know I don’t have much time left with them. I see them differently now, as people whose every word and action I need to cherish so I don’t ever forget anything about them. I listen to their stories and frame my arguments with them with a touch of humor and while I don’t hug them because I haven’t hugged anyone since March, I tinge my words with affection and make sure they know they are loved. I cling to the idea that people live longer now, that I may have a good fifteen or so years left with them, but I also cling to my anxiety-induced notion that it could all end tomorrow. When I’m awake at 3am I’m thinking of accidents and heart attacks and covid and weird ways in which we die and how our end dates sometimes come suddenly and without warning.
My immediate reaction to those thoughts is to cram as much life as I can into the here and now, to embrace every moment I’m alive with vigor, to make sure everyone I know understands what they mean to me. But the reality is, this never happens. I find myself sitting on the couch binge watching a terrible tv show just so I can make fun of it. I forget to return phone calls to people I care about. I slip into a place where it’s not necessary to say “I love you” all the time. I waste my time, I waste my place in this world. I am human and it is unfair of me to expect myself to place such a high value on every moment enough to deem them all worthy of life itself. It’s unfair to expect myself to attain self actualization before my end date comes.
I wander through life in a daze sometimes, a combination of anxiety and depression forcing me through view my days through a hazy lens. I’m unable to grasp onto moments the way I want to, I’m incapable of setting goals and keeping them. So I meander more than move through life, spending more time huddled on my couch than outside smelling the roses. It is only in the middle of the night when it hits me that I should live more and it seems really unfucking fair that the only time I have the urge to grab the brass rings is when the world is dark and empty.
I have so much to do before that expiration date comes for me, before I’m relegated to just an in memoriam picture on the back of a funeral card, before someone recognizes my end date as a thing of closure between us. I fear that date. I freeze up when I think about it and sometimes I will find myself sobbing into my pillow about it, mourning for all those I’ve lost, and all those I will lose, and for myself, my life, my being.
I don’t know what to do with these cards. I have a small collection of them; cousins, aunts, uncles, friends. They pop up here and there as I’m cleaning a closet or going through a box of photos. I don’t keep them all in one place, they are haphazardly strewn about the house and when I come across one, it’s a gut punch, a stab in the heart, a reminder that we all have an end date. Discarding them feels like an act of violence.
I take my cousin’s card and put it with her husband’s card in my sock drawer, bury them in there where they won’t find me for a while. One day I’ll be digging in the drawer and I’ll find them and it will come as a shock to me once again that they are dead and I’ll look at those dates and feel the finality of death infiltrate my heart once more. I’ll make a mental note to live life to the fullest but I’ll never follow through.