What if This Were the Last Year of Your Life?

My flickr and blogging friend, Deborah, is battling breast cancer right now. You can read about her journey in San Francisco Magazine, on flickr, and on her blog.

In a recent post, Deborah spoke of potential metastases (is that how that's spelled?). Fortunately for all of us, she does not have to face that particular hurdle right now. However, when she wasn't sure, she discussed her bucket list, and how she wanted to live the last year of her life.

That concept truly touched me, between my mother's passing, just 3 and a half very short years ago, and my own demons, I got to thinking. I thought about a lot of things. But mostly, I thought about what I would want to have done and how I would want to have lived the last year of *my* life. Sadly, I knew that I hadn't been living the way I would like to be. Were I to die tomorrow, I would have regrets, and I most certainly would not want *this* to be the last year of my life.

Food for thought, huh?

How do you want to live the last year of your life? Are you living that way now? For we, thankfully, cannot know, or most of us can't, anyway, when that last year is going to be.

So, if nothing else, I have decided to try to live the rest of my life like the last year of my life.

Like Tim McGraw's song says, "live like you were dying!"

He said I was in my early forties, with a lot of life before me
And one moment came that stopped me on a dime
I spent most of the next days, looking at the x-rays
Talking bout' the options and talking bout' sweet times.
I asked him when it sank in, that this might really be the real end
How's it hit 'cha when you get that kind of news?
Man what did ya do?
He said

I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

He said I was finally the husband, that most the time I wasn't
And I became a friend, a friend would like to have
And all of a sudden goin' fishin, wasn't such an imposition
And I went three times that year I lost my dad
Well I finally read the good book, and I took a good long hard look
At what I'd do if I could do it all again
And then

I went skydiving
I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Shu
And I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I gave forgiveness I'd been denyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'

Like tomorrow was the end
And ya got eternity to think about what to do with it
What should you do with it
What can I do with it
What would I do with it

I went rocky mountain climbing
I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu
And man I loved deeper
And I spoke sweeter
And I watched an eagle as it was flyin'
And he said some day I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dyin'