There is a story my sister reminded me of last week about someone asking a 104-year-old what it felt like to have lived such a long life. I expected, because I am foolish in the usual ways, something grand and all knowing. Some wisdom polished smooth by a century of birthdays. A sentence involving gratitude, maybe God, maybe the word “blessing.” Instead, the person said, simply, “It felt fast.”
This is the sort of sentence that stops you in your tracks and forces you to examine all of your life choices, and to do so quickly.
We want a long life to feel long. We want time to behave ethically and to reward our obsession with doing it all right. We want a hundred and four years to accumulate inside a person like a library, each decade shelved and available, each love and loss preserved with the dignity of archival paper. But apparently even a century can collapse, in memory, into the sensation of having just been here. One minute you are young and making some terrible decision with your whole chest. The next, people are asking you what it was like to survive history, and the only honest answer is that it went by too quickly.
I keep thinking about this because I am at the age where life has started to reveal itself, like noticing dust in a room you thought was clean. I have begun to understand that adulthood is not an arrival point but a narrowing series of repetitions. You look up from the sink and realize an entire season has gone missing. You look at your child and feel time perform its little knife trick in your gut. You look at a photograph of yourself from ten years ago and want to apologize to her for all the ways she thought she was already late.
This is the first horror: that life moves faster than meaning can organize it.
The second horror is that the very impulse I trust most in myself, the instinct to meet life with enthusiasm, might be exactly what kills me.
Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon, died in 1952 after surgery in Nice, France. The exact details are told with slight variations, as all good death stories are, but the essential shape is almost offensively literary. She was recovering, feeling well, and in a playful effort to prove her vitality, she kicked her leg into the air. The gesture dislodged a blood clot. She blacked out and died. The New Yorker describes it as a “puckish” can-can style kick, which is the kind of detail that makes reality seem less like a serious institution and more like a cruel little playwright with excellent timing.
There is something almost unbearable about the author of Goodnight Moon dying this way. A woman who wrote one of the great rituals of childhood disappearance. Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon. Goodnight light and the red balloon. A book that teaches children the soft choreography of leaving consciousness, object by object, until the world becomes safe enough to vanish from. And then its author vanishes because she was, for one bright second, delighted to still be alive.
The body is shady in this way. It is always pretending to be us and then betraying the bit. We spend so much of life building the self as if we are not also meat with weather inside it. We develop taste. We choose curtains. We become people with favorite olive oils and minor opinions about lamps. We moisturize. We build identities elaborate enough to distract from the humiliating fact that a clot, a cell, a soft blockage moving through the dark river of the body can overrule everything else we thought we had built.
I don’t say this to be morbid, I say it because these two stories seem to speak to each other from opposite ends of the same Kelly green room. One says: even if you get more time than almost anyone, it will still feel brief. The other says: even if you are doing well, even if you are kicking your leg into the air to prove how much life is left in you, the trapdoor may already be open.
This should make me want to live more radically, I suppose. That is the clean conclusion. The TED Talk version. Book the trip. Wear the yellow dress. Eat the decadent cake. Tell people you love them.
Still, I am frightened by the unknown. A sudden death story always makes the living briefly theatrical. We begin auditioning for aliveness. We promise to stop waiting. We imagine ourselves transformed into people who no longer postpone pleasure, no longer save the good soap, no longer answer emails from bed with the exhausted obedience of a saint or court jester. For about thirty-six hours, we are reborn. Then the old life returns with its invoices and wet laundry and the dull ache behind the eyes.
Maybe that is not failure. Maybe that is the point. Life is not lived in revelation. It is lived in maintenance. Most of us do not get to spend our days in the clean moral weather of epiphany. We get errands. We get the weird mole we keep meaning to have checked. We get to love people while also being irritated that they left crumbs on the counter. We get to make a life out of the very things that seem to be stealing it.
This is the part I am trying to understand: how to take life seriously without making it so precious that I am scared to get my hands dirty.
Because preciousness has its own dishonesty. It insists that every moment must be savored, which is just another way of making a person feel guilty for being tired. Not every moment can be luminous. Some moments are just you standing in the kitchen eating shredded cheese from the bag while your phone dies. Some days do not want to be transfigured. Some days want to be survived with a little humor and a clean pair of socks.
And yet. And yet.
A 104-year-old says it felt fast, and suddenly I am looking at my ordinary life with suspicion. Not contempt, but more like awe with a hangover. The bath toys. The half-used lemons. The coffee gone cold because I forgot I made it (yes, I will drink it anyway and blink away the bitter taste on my tongue). The body I keep criticizing as though it is not the only vehicle carrying me through this strange, temporary country. The friendships I assume will always be there. The marriage, the work, the mothering, the private hungers I keep postponing because some dull committee in my head insists there will be a better season for them.
But what if this is the season?
Not the perfect one. Not the calm one. Not the one where the house is clean and the inbox is merciful and I have become the kind of woman who stretches every morning and remembers to thaw chicken. This one. The imperfect, cluttered, increasignly humiliating one.
There is no establishing shot or perfect script. There is only the room. The moon. The cow jumping over it. The old lady whispering hush. The body in the bed, thrilled to be healing. The leg in the air. The century that felt fast.
The obscene joke is that life is both durable and delicate. It can withstand heartbreak, childbirth, grief, debt, fucked up family systems, elections, fluorescent lighting, and years of pretending the thing you want does not matter. Then, somehow, it can be undone by one hidden clot. One exuberant gesture. One internal betrayal no one could have styled into meaning beforehand.
I keep returning to Margaret Wise Brown’s final movement because it is so unlike the way we imagine death should arrive. It was not solemn. It was not composed. It did not give anyone time to gather around and say the correct things. It came through joy, or at least through performance. A little flourish. A proof of life.
Maybe the lesson is not to live every day like it is your last, which has always sounded exhausting and financially irresponsible for someone in my tax bracket. Maybe it is to understand that life is not waiting for us to become more worthy of it. It is not holding itself at a distance until we are thinner, calmer, richer, better organized, less afraid. It is already here, slipping past us with vulgar speed, asking only that we occasionally stop mistaking postponement for discipline.
I do not know how to hold this knowledge without becoming unbearable. I do not want to become one of those people who says things like “tomorrow isn’t promised” in a decorative font surrounded by canva clip art. But tomorrow isn’t promised. Worse, neither is the feeling that today was sufficiently noticed.
So I am trying, in my small and inconsistent way, to notice.
Not beautifully. Not all the time. I still waste hours. I still scroll myself into a stupor. I still treat my own desires like administrative tasks that can be moved to next week. I still become enraged by minor inconveniences despite being, in the cosmic sense, lucky to experience inconvenience at all.
But sometimes I catch it. The speed. The shimmer. The ridiculous privilege of being inside a day before it becomes memory. My daughter laughing in another room. My own hand on the speedometer. The light coming through the window with no ambition to be meaningful, which of course makes it meaningful. The life I keep trying to improve when perhaps I could, at least occasionally, inhabit it.
Because someday, if I am lucky, someone may ask me what it was like.
And I am afraid I will tell the truth.
It felt fast.