A reminder from illness and life to seize the day

In the movie Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams’ character, Mr. Keating, a professor at an elite boarding school for boys, asks a student to open his hymnal to page 542 and read the poem’s first stanza. Mr. Pitts flips through his book until he finds the poem and pauses before reading its title, “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time.” His tone is more question than declaration.

“Yes, come on,” Mr. Keating says. “Rather appropriate, isn’t it?”

Teenage boys snicker as Mr. Pitts begins to read:

“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

Tomorrow will be dying.”

The Latin term for the first line, Mr. Keating tells his students, is carpe diem.

Seize the day.

For these young boys, it is a lesson in mortality, a reminder that one day they will be as their predecessors: “Fertilizing daffodils,” Mr. Keating says.

Dead Poets Society is one of my favorites, heartbreaking and inspirational at the same time. How could I not love a movie about poetry and learning life’s hard lessons, especially with one of my favorite actors? As a kid, I watched Robin Williams play the hapless alien on Mork & Mindy, the laughter a break from my parents’ fights, and as an adult, I cried during his dramatic performances, inspired by this man who seemed full of life.

His death hit me hard. That it happened the same day we took my mother off life support made it more difficult to process. A week before, she was shopping at the grocery store and cleaning her home, same as always. We thought she’d live well past seventy-four. But a severe hemorrhagic stroke thought otherwise.

Two years later we lost my father-in-law to a heart attack, and now another member of our family has cancer. Six months ago, she dashed about her kitchen gathering plates and glasses for the Christmas dinner my husband cooked at her home. Today, she can’t stand up without help.

Every month I take my therapy dog, Maggie, to visit our small town’s nursing home. This month, I found one of our favorite residents in a hospital bed rather than her recliner. I didn’t understand what this meant until she told me: “I can’t get up. Never will.”

She said she was in so much pain she prayed God would take her quickly. That would have choked me up by itself but given that someone I love has stage IV cancer, I almost lost it. I smiled at her and started for the door, wanting to flee before my tears fell. She repeated her prayer.

I turned around and stepped toward her bed. With one hand over hers, I squeezed slightly and said, “Take care.” I didn’t know what else to say. Since I’m not religious, nothing about God popped into my head. But I couldn’t leave the room without saying something. Maybe I should have said I hoped rosebuds awaited her on the other side.

Next, we visited another of Maggie’s fans, a woman whose talk on our first meeting of waiting for the nurse so she could sign the papers to go home seemed genuine. This time, she introduced me to her baby, a doll in infant jammies swaddled in a tiny blanket, knit cap snug on its head. It was her daughter, and she’d been fussy during the night. Only then did I notice the bed she was in. Maggie’s friend was never going home.

Mortality stares us all in the face. It’s easy in our twenties or thirties to say someone in their seventies or eighties has lived a long, full life. Easiest when we’re not the person staring into the unknown. Less easy as we get older, advancing in age along with those around us.

It’s easier to worry — about our health, the health of people we love who seem okay on the outside. Does cancer lurk beneath the surface? Is a heart attack waiting to happen? A brain aneurysm about to burst?

Will they be here thirty years from now? Twenty? Ten? One? Will they be here tomorrow, or even tonight? Will I? Will you?

No one knows. Each day we greet is one to appreciate. It’s not that easy, I know. I watched, or, as it was, bore the brunt of my mother’s struggle against her own undiagnosed, and therefore untreated, bipolar disorder. I’ve dealt with my own bouts of depression, although never to the point where I considered taking my own life. It breaks my heart that so many do, like the man whose movie character introduced me to the poem that became my life’s mantra.

For ourselves, for those no longer with us, and for those unable to see that life is worth living, we have many rosebuds waiting.

Gather them while ye may.

Seize each day.

Originally published in Indelible Ink on Medium on June 25, 2019.