The last thing I’d ever write
November 2, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 87 Comments
The note above was penned by an eighty-five-year-old man named Robert. One day last month, he drove his car down a steep rural road to look at a pond. When he tried to drive back the way he came, the car rolled off the path and became mired in a ravine.
Robert was unable to walk out of his situation due to back problems that left him only able to get around with the help of a walker. He had no food. The only water he had barely filled an 8 ounce bottle. He honked his horn until the car battery was depleted.
Robert sat there, alone in his car, for two days.
With no food, little water, and temperatures in the upper 90s, he realized things didn’t look good. So he grabbed a pen and began writing on the car’s armrest.
Look closely and you can make a bit of it out. The first—and Robert said the most important—was that he make sure everyone knew it was an accident. Robert didn’t want anyone thinking he committed suicide. He wrote that the car’s wheels spun out. He asked that his family give him a closed casket.
About forty hours later, Robert was found. Turns out that final note wasn’t needed after all. As you can imagine, the whole ordeal changed him. Robert has a new outlook on life. He understands its delicateness. He knows every moment is precious.
It’s a good story with a happy ending. But me, I can’t stop thinking about that note.
What would I tell my family? What would I tell you? What would I say if I could never say anything more? Those questions have preyed on my mind since reading Robert’s story. I figured the only way I could start thinking about something else is to go ahead and write my letter.
So here it is, the last thing I’d ever write:
Dear All,
I don’t know how I managed to get myself in this mess. I think a lot of times you can’t see the trouble that’s coming until it’s on you. This is probably one of those times. I guess I should hurry. I never used to think much about time. Suddenly, time seems pretty important.
To my family, I want to say that the very last thing I want to do is leave you behind. You need to know that as much as I’m ready for heaven, I’m thinking the angels will have to drag me there. But don’t worry, I’ll find me a bench somewhere near the gate and wait for each of you.
To my wife, I’m sorry I was never the man I wanted to be. I’m thankful you overlooked that. Take care of the kids. Raise them to believe like you and fight like me.
To my son, there are few things more difficult in life than knowing how to be a man. I’ll give you a quick summary—work hard, laugh much, pray often. Love dignity rather than money. Face your darkness. Let your word be your bond. You’ll do well in life if you cling to those things. Know that I will always be proud of you.
To my daughter, you’ve taught me more about faith than anyone I’ve ever known. Remember this: we seldom have any choice as to the wars we must fight, we can only elect to face them with honor or cowardice.
To my friends, I know it may appear at times that I prefer silence to speech and solitude to company, but you mended the gashes I had rent into my own heart. Whatever goodness is in me was fostered by you.
I ask that you dispose of my remains as you see fit. I have no preference. Whatever flesh and bone is left behind is not me, it is merely an empty house that God has deemed I’ve outgrown.
Do not mourn, laugh.
Do not look back, look forward.
Live intently.
And last, know that all that separates the two of us is but one stroke of heaven’s eternal clock. Life is but a dream. Death is simply when we wake.
A letter to me
July 6, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 28 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
When helping your parents clean out their attic, it helps if you approach the task as a recovery mission. You aren’t discarding, you’re salvaging. I know this from experience. I did it three weeks ago.
We found the normal things—Christmas decorations long forgotten, toys long neglected, and several items of which no one can remember using, much less purchasing. We found not-so-normal things as well. Like the box of notebooks.
You could say I caught the writing bug early; I was filling notebooks before I understood what words were, drawing pictures of the sun and trees and describing them with an jumble of mismatched and incoherent letters. These, sadly, were not in the box.
The high school stuff was.
Lyrics mostly, as if the words to Skid Row’s “18 and Life” and Cinderella’s “Coming Home” were so moving, so utterly profound, that they warranted preservation for the ages.
There were thoughts as well. Plenty of them, all sopping with the angst and shallowness that define the teenage years. Some were laughable in their naivety—“The suddenness of life is a guarantee the soul is eternal.” Others, to my surprise, weren’t so bad at all—“We have lost much of the language of religion, but little of our longing for a faith in something larger than ourselves.”
Memories, all. Not the false ones either, the ones that are saccharine in the remembering. These were more a mixture of sweet and salty, proof that my recollections were true. Regardless, the decision of whether the box was to be discarded or salvaged was an easy one.
It all went to the junk pile save for a single sheet of paper torn from the notebook on top. The last page, as a matter of fact. Written two days before I graduated.
It was a letter. Not to the me I was then, but to the me I am now.
A portion:
“I don’t know who you are (hard to do that, especially since it’s tough enough knowing who I am). I don’t know what you’re doing, either. But I can make the sort of guess with both that people do when they see a falling star or a discarded eyelash, the sort of guess that has a wish at the end. So I’m guessing you’ve made it. I’m guessing you’re rich and famous and happy, and I’m guessing you’re far away. And I figure as long as I guess and wish those things, I’m going to be okay. Because that means I’ll eventually be you.”
I remembered writing that. It was late at night. I was outside, scribbling in my notebook while watching the stars and sneaking a Marlboro red. I remembered how I felt then—sweet and salty, so it must be true—knowing that part of my life was about to fall away and another was ready to begin.
I was afraid. Afraid of the world and my place in it. And in that fear I wrote that night with a sense of purity and honesty that even now I try to capture each time I reach for pen and paper.
I wrote those words in secrecy, and now, all these years later, I snatched them away in secrecy as well. No one saw me stash that letter into my pocket. I’ve kept it since on the top of my office desk, there and not there, like a sickness hidden from a doctor for fear it is a symptom of something more serious.
“So I’m guessing you’ve made it. I’m guessing you’re rich and famous and happy, and I’m guessing you’re far away. And I figure as long as I guess and wish those things, I’m going to be okay. Because that means I’ll eventually be you.”
I couldn’t let those four sentences go. They weren’t supposed to be disposed. They were supposed to be salvaged. I needed to answer myself.
Today is my birthday. I suppose by some sort of twisted logic, that’s why I waited until now to send a note of my own back in time. After all, birthdays are much like graduations. They are a falling away and a beginning.
So on my porch this morning in front of the mountains and the birds and the rising sun, I wrote this:
“I’m not rich. I’m not famous. And though twenty-one years separate us in time, only five miles separate us in distance. But I’ve found things greater than those, and I’ve become happy in the finding. Because the things you search for as a child are not the things you stumble upon as an adult, and thank God for that.”
Time well wasted
June 20, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 19 Comments
I bought a cheap watch from a crazy man
Floating down Canal.
It doesn’t use numbers or moving hands,
It always just says Now.
Now you may be thinking that I was had,
But this watch is never wrong.
And If I have trouble the warranty said
‘Breathe in, breathe out, move on.’—Jimmy Buffett
I spent last week on vacation. Traded seven days of Virginia Mountains for seven days of North Carolina beaches. Emerald Isle, to be exact. If there was ever a name more fitting of its location, it’s that.
I’d spent a good four months looking forward to the trip. It’s been a tough time at work, a tough time all around, and of course everyone knows the cure for a tough time is an easy place.
But the truth? As the day of our departure drew closer, I didn’t want to leave. There was so much that needed to be done. So much that must be finished or started or continued. Dropping everything to sit in the sand seemed a little selfish and irresponsible. I was too busy to go on vacation. That’s not to say I thought the world would fall apart in my absence. I guess it had more to do with the notion that I’d held on tight for so long that I’d forgotten the value in letting go.
And there is value in letting go. There’s a lot.
At some point we’re all introduced to the fact that we do not make the world spin. But in this age of technological wonder where so many of us are driven—and at times even expected—to share our thoughts and happenings to the world with a simple click of a button, it’s easy to convince yourself that even if you don’t make the world spin, it will nonetheless go wobbly without you. I won’t say I fell for that lie. I will say I was headed in that general direction.
I spend much of my life on the written page. I count that as a blessing rather than a curse. And yet after so much time spent looking outward at the world, I found I was losing a bit of me in the process. Over the past year I have heard from a great many people about a great many things, and yet I realized I rarely heard from myself about the things that mattered most.
In the end that’s why I fled to the ocean, that vast expanse of nothingness that is so big it drowns out the little things and renders the big things bare. No writing, no news, no computer. Just deer, crabs, and the three dolphins that played tag just beyond the waves each morning outside my window.
And you know what I found when I returned home? That I didn’t miss much. Anthony Weiner resigned. More jobs were lost. There were floods and drought. Wars. Accusations. More of the same. The earth spun and I followed, though for seven precious days I chose to trail at my own speed rather than to flail at keeping up with everyone and everything else.
What I learned there will likely fill these pages for the time being. There’s much to ponder and memories to sift. My week at the shore resembled a fine wine in that the flavor is only truly tasted upon swallowing.
In the meantime, I leave you with this:
It isn’t how full our days are that matter, but how fully we live them.
Not how fast we go, but how closely we look.
Not how much we hear, but how often we listen.
Not how often we laugh more than cry, but how often we’re willing to do both.
Time well spent is valuable, but so is time well wasted. I know that now. Because it’s in those minutes and hours that we are still and quiet and watching and listening that the truths we seek are made manifest. They appear like glistening shells washed upon endless shores, offerings for the taking.
Before I left I was convinced that wealth was best measured in happiness and peace and good memories. I know better now.
I know now that wealth is best measured in moments.
All will wash away
June 15, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 6 Comments
(Originally published June 17, 2009)
You can’t beat a stroll along the surf in the evening. It is the perfect desert for a day that has offered plenty of feasts for both the eyes and the spirit.
Using the setting sun as my compass, I skirt the incoming tide and pause every few steps to snatch a stray shell before the retreating waves can steal it away. My toes dig into the wet sand as the pipers and gulls flutter around me, searching for one last snack before finally calling their day done.
This will be my last evening at the beach. Sometime early Thursday morning we will brush the sand from our clothes, pack our suitcases, and head west for home. (A secret, though, between you and me: I’m not shaking my sand off. I want to walk around with it on me a little while longer.) So tonight I am enjoying one last walk to take it all in.
And I’m not the only one. A few yards in front of me is a young surfer just out of the water and taking the long way home.
He places his board down just beyond the surf and bends as if tying an imaginary shoe. He slowly traces something into the wet sand with a finger and, still stooping, considers the marks. A slow and solemn nod displays his approval, then he rises and walks on.
So do I, pausing after a few steps to pick up a clam shell for my daughter. I look back up to see the surfer now heading for dry sand and the boardwalk, where a battered red bicycle waits to take him home. Curious, I walk ahead to the spot where he had bent down and find these four words:
ALL WILL WASH AWAY.
I look over and see him climb onto the bike and tuck his surfboard under his right arm. There he sits, staring out at the beach.
And here I stand, staring down at these profound words.
You don’t generally expect such deep thinking from hip surfer dudes, just as you don’t generally expect it from redneck hicks. In that, we are kindred spirits. And in more, too.
Because these past few days have brought much the same sentiment from me. I’ve been coming here since I was a child, and that sense of permanence has always been a source of comfort. The ocean never changes. It is immense and beautiful and old and will always be such. Yet while it is fixed, I am not. I may visit this same place every summer, but I always bring along a different me.
The me this year is much different than the person who last gazed upon these waters, though exactly how different I cannot say. Rather than time dulling the edges of our lives, I think it sharpens them. It makes clearer the things that matter and the things that do not. Perhaps it is because my visit this year falls just a few weeks shy of my birthday that my thoughts have been centered more upon the future than the present. Thoughts that are best summed in the four words below me.
ALL WILL WASH AWAY.
There are times when life becomes simply unbearable for me, when the tides crash in much more than ease out and the treasures life gives me are snatched away and demanded back. And I’m sure I’m not alone. I have a feeling the young man on the red bike has recently suffered through something like that. I have a feeling you have suffered through that as well. Because we all have things in our lives that scare us and leave us to quake at the possibility that we are to merely borrow them for a time instead of holding them forever.
We all fear that all we love will be consumed by the enormity of this world and erased forever.
Yet still we arrive daily in our lives to write upon the shore, to cast our hearts and our hopes into the ebb and flow of our days in faith that we just may happen upon something that neither time nor tides can erase.
That is our quest in life. To find the eternal. To find that which cannot be washed away.
The art of walking
May 11, 2011 by Billy Coffey · 16 Comments
image courtesy of photobucket.com
I see her five days a week, Monday through Friday. Always at 10:00 or so, just as I’m dropping off mail and picking up more.
She’s always dressed the same—faded jeans, white T shirt. Always has a cup of coffee in her hand, held up close to her mouth, even if she’s not sipping. Her strides are as short as her age is long, to the point where she seems to patter along instead of walk.
There are, of course, many walkers around campus. The scenery is green and quiet and safe. But her routine ensures she stands out from the rest. She will take three steps and pause, her head down as if in prayer, then sip. Take three more steps, repeat. Every day, Monday through Friday. And probably the others too, but I’m at home and can’t see her.
I was at the 7-11 this morning, hunting for lunch, and said hello to the person in line in front of me. Turns out it was her.
“I know you,” she said. “You’re the boy who passes me every day.”
I said yes and smiled, thinking it had been a very long time since someone called me boy.
She sipped her coffee and smiled. “You must think I’m a crazy person.”
“Why’s that?”
“For the way I go about my morning constitutional,” she said. “You know.” She moved out of the line and proceeded to take three small steps toward the candy aisle, stopped, sipped. “That.”
“I don’t think that makes you a crazy person,” I said.
“Yes you do.”
I paused. Said, “Though I’ll admit it has upon occasion made me a mite curious.”
“Ha!” she said, stepping back into line. “I knew it. You know how many people think that? That I’m crazy? I get that all the time.”
I nodded, not sure of an appropriate response.
“But I’m not,” she said. “Not crazy at all. I’m smart. Smarter than all the other walkers.” Then she leaned in close and whispered, “Wasn’t born that way, though. I got smart the way you’re supposed to—by screwing up a lot first.”
The man at the cash register finally bought his lottery tickets. He left, the line moved up.
“Makes sense,” I said. “If that’s true, then I’m going to be a genius one of these days.”
“Wanna know why I do that? Why I walk that way?”
“Sure.”
“I forgot how to walk.”
I looked at her, this woman who said she wasn’t crazy at all but sure did seem like she was.
“I was a lawyer in a former life,” she told me, the line moving once more. “That’s a horrible existence. Always running around, always in a hurry. Know what happens when you’re always in a hurry? Life passes you. I got rich, but I lost entire years of living. Isn’t that horrible?”
“Sounds like it,” I said.
She laid her coffee on the counter and smiled at the cashier, a tired-looking young man who would rather be somewhere else.
“I retired last year and decided I was going to learn how to walk again. Not like the other people who parade around on that campus. They’re always out there with some intention. Shape this or firm that. Not me. My only intention is to feel and listen. When I’m walking, I’m feeling. But I always stop, because the only time anyone can listen is when they stop.”
She paid and left. I sat my lunch on the counter and watched her go. She paused at the edge of the parking lot and sipped her coffee. Stretched out her arms. Then she walked three steps and stopped.
Feeling and listening.
I like this lady. She’s taught me much.
Like how sometimes we have to slow down so life doesn’t pass us, and how we can live entire years and yet lose them just the same.
A matter of time
July 1, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 30 Comments
I’m going to die on November 5, 2055. So says the nifty little quiz I just filled out on the internet. And though it’s hard to put much faith in the accuracy of a prediction based in part on how often I recycle (question number five), this is good information to have. Because whether the date is exact or not, the truth of it is.
One day, I’m going to die.
November 5, 2055, does seem reasonable. I’ll be eighty-three years old then, and my children will be in their late forties. I’ll most likely have grandchildren, be retired, and spend most of my days telling everyone who will listen that the world was a much better place back in 2009.
So yes, dying at eighty-three would be okay with me. That’s a good age to smile at this world and wave goodbye, right there in the meaty part between hanging around too long and not long enough.
At least, that’s what I thought. I’m not so sure now. Having forty-six years left for me to finish whatever it is I want to start seems like a lot of time, but it isn’t when you start to dig a little deeper. Trust me. Because that’s what I did.
If the scribbles on the sheet of paper in front of me are right, most of my remaining forty-six years are already spoken for. I’ll spend twelve of them sleeping, three eating, ten either exercising or resting, and another ten just on home maintenance.
All of which leaves me with a grand total of eleven years to live. One hundred and thirty-two months to make a difference.
Not a lot, is it? Especially considering the fact that November 5, 2055 is at best an approximation and at worst a clever marketing ploy designed to deluge me with junk mail. My end may come later. It may also come before I finish writing this. I don’t know.
None of us do.
Which is why it amazes me that we always think there is time. Plenty of time. There’s always tomorrow, we say. And that may be true for some of us. But not for everyone.
About 146,000 people in the world will wake up this morning thinking there’s plenty of time, not knowing this will be their last day in this life. That’s 6,098 people an hour, 102 people every minute, and about 2 per second. In the time it took you to read this paragraph, twenty people have died.
Amazing, isn’t it? Sad, too. Not because our lives must end, but because the thought of death rarely crosses our minds.
Life fools us into thinking it is this hulking, indestructible beast, when it’s really as fragile as a porcelain figurine . It is holy and sacred and fleeting and never guaranteed. Believing otherwise is not only dangerous to us, it’s dangerous to how we live.
The truth? We don’t have plenty of time. Our every breath is the oil that moves the gears of our days, sending us closer to the moment when we say goodbye to this world and hello to the next. We can’t put off chasing that dream. We can’t delay making those amends. We can’t wait to say “I love you” or “I’m sorry.”
We can’t linger when it comes to the things that make living worthwhile, the people and the dreams that give us meaning. We have to take care of them every minute, every moment. Because maybe they or we won’t be here the next.
There is no time for doubts. No time for hate. No time for hanging on when it’s time to let go and letting go when it’s time to hang on. We get one shot at this world, one chance to do something good and right and true. That time isn’t later. It’s now.
Don’t think it’s never too late. Because sometimes it is.
Ever forward
May 25, 2009 by Billy Coffey · 43 Comments
“You know that brush is wet, right?” my wife asks.
I don’t. Not till then. I smear the blue against my jeans, thinking that if I had bought them at the store like that, it would have set me back about a hundred dollars.
“Is he sure he wants to do this?” I ask.
“He said he did,” she answers.
“Do you believe him?”
She pauses then says, “I don’t want to.”
“Me neither,” I say, “but it’s his room, right?”
Another pause. Then: “Right.”
We had painted the Winnie the Pooh mural when our daughter was born, and she had slept beneath it for two years until she had to move out to make room for our son. But at five, he thinks Winnie the Pooh is for kids. And he is no longer a kid. My task today is to erase it. To paint over it and cover it up with pictures of Derek Jeter and Lou Gehrig.
I do not want to do this.
So this morning I painted the trim, the doors, and the other three walls, trying to postpone the inevitable. But with everything else done, the inevitable is here.
It’s just a stupid wall, I tell myself. But it’s not, and I know that. This is a symbol. A memory of the fear and joy of becoming a parent for the first time.
You battle the passage of time with your children. You fight to keep them small and innocent and on your lap. And even if you know they will soon be big and experienced and on their own, you fight anyway.
Painting over this feels like surrender. And I’m not quite ready to wave the white flag.
My eyes gaze around his room, and I catch myself wondering how much longer my son will be in it. He’ll start kindergarten next year. No doubt it’ll seem as if he’ll start high school the year after that, graduate from college the year after that, and the year after that I’ll be holding my grandchildren.
Somewhere in between, my son will realize something. He’ll find the truth about his old man. He’ll discover that I’m really not the superhero cowboy he thinks I am. That I might be tough on the outside, but I’m pretty soft on the inside. That I can’t fix everything, don’t know anything, and fret over a lot more than I let on.
He’ll have his own life with his own family. I’ll have to let him go so he can find his own way.
Such is the constant churning of life, ever forward and never backward. And though we plant our shoulders to the gears of our days and beg them to stop, they roll on anyway.
But just as I am ready to surrender after all, I spot something on my son’s dresser that makes me smile. Sitting there beside his Lightning McQueen lamp is my father’s wallet, left by him just a few hours ago. My normally steady hand seems to disappear whenever I’m painting trim, so I had called him for a little help.
And he answered. Just like he always has.
My thirty-seventh birthday is a little more than a month away. A lot has changed in my life since I was my son’s age. A lot hasn’t, too.
Still, after all these years, my father is there for me. There to help me fix the truck or cut some wood or tend the garden. There for advice or wisdom or to shoot the breeze.
Just…there.
The fact that I have my own life and my own family, the fact that I’ve found my own way, hasn’t changed everything. Time doesn’t always break our bonds. Sometimes it grows them deeper.
I move from my son’s bed to the tray of paint next to the wall, pick up the roller, and begin. Gone is the leafy tree, pouty Eeyore, Piglet, and Tigger. Gone is Christopher Robin and the unknown book he’s entertained his friends with for over seven years. And then, finally, Pooh is gone, too.
And that’s okay. Because as I paint I have in my mind a far-away picture of another man’s house and another child’s dresser. And I think of that man sitting upon the edge of that child’s bed, staring at my wallet.
Author of Snow Day and Paper Angels (November 2011), both by FaithWords. But don't let that fool you. I'm just as confused as anyone.
And that is fine with me, because the great thing about wandering around in the fog is that you never know what you might run into.
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