None of us wants to contemplate our own death.

We’re not really encouraged to.

We live in a culture that denies mortality, one that worships youth.

We’d rather side-step the fact that eventually we will go down into the dark grave.

Most of us don’t have a plan for end-of-life care, or have meaningful conversations with our families about it.

We like to say we live our lives with no regrets

But do we?

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Recently I read about something called the Stanford Letter Writing Project. It began as a research project designed to study palliative care.

And part of the study involved surveying terminally ill people and having them do a kind of life review.

And they found that most of their answers shared a common thread:

Regret.

This data made the researchers a bit uneasy.

Because over and over their subjects revealed personal, painful things that they had never shared with anyone else, not even to their own families.

Forget Bucket Lists – these weren’t things they wished they had done.

They were things they wish they had simply said to the people they cared most about in their lives.

Words.

Simple words.

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I visualize this Spoon River exercise as this opportunity – an invitation to take our shoes off and rest under the oak tree in the graveyard.

Not to write an obituary, but to pen a love letter to the present.

A missive addressed to the living.

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And now when I think back on high school, it seems like an odd choice to have 16-year-olds playing those elderly, decaying old souls.

Wouldn’t seasoned actors have been better?

But for us kids, it felt like the most natural thing in the world. 

We understood enough about regret to want no part of it.

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And all these years later, re-reading the Spoon River script – the words come back to me like a prompt:

A reminder to stop pretending that I have forever.

To quit trying to be right, and to settle the grudge, and say I forgive you.

To own up to something that I did or didn’t do and say I’m sorry.

To stop feeling guilty and to say I wish I had been present when you needed me.

To pull my kids aside to say I’m so proud of who you are. 

To say I love you even though I assume someone knows it anyway.

To simply say thank you even when gratitude sticks in our throat.

And to do all of this NOW.

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If you’re like me, it’s not an easy thing, it’s scary to go into the graveyard. It’s much easier to avert the eyes and step briskly on by.

But to do so means missing out on conversing with the audience of the living – with the ones in our lives we love most.

So today I want us to sit under the old oak trees in the graveyard and play out our roles.

No regrets.

And even to find a scrap of solace if we can – in the here and the now, on these little tombstones, in our beloved Spoon River, while we still can.

 

 

 

On the web:

• Stanford.edu.com
• The Stanford Letter Project: dear-doc.appspot.com