Atul Gawande On What Matters in the End

I began volunteering with a Hospice center earlier this year and now, once a week, I make my way down the F train to South Brooklyn and up a few flights of stairs to Joe's apartment. We've become fast friends. He's 88, loves poetry and the Red Sox (I've asked him dozens of questions about seeing Ted Williams play left at Fenway), has quite firm opinions about various city planning policies and regulations, keeps pens and pads near his bed to write the occasional sentence, and will stop mid-thought sometimes to look across the room at a painting of his wife. She died last year, and when he told me that, he paused for quite a while and said, "and isn't she beautiful."

I hope I am always profoundly affected by the backdrop of mortality, that it forever breathes life into my own. Chatting with Joe, a wonderful man whose life is coming to a close in front of my eyes, does just that. Each time I leave, with every finished conversation about Joe DiMaggio and his old cat and D-Day and Truman and his typewriter, with every next week, Joe! I hear myself measuring time in the most natural taken-for-granted way. And that's ok, but it's also ok to feel quite emotional on the F train back to my part of Brooklyn, back to a life of rhythm and pace that I'm more familiar with, one that seems so much less finite than the Joe's I just left.

In every conversation I've had of any significance about death, in every book I've ever read that touches on it meaningfully, there is one force at play -- a single theme, one that powers every significant memory of happiness or loss or regret or peace: love. And seeing Joe, his life reduced to a time block shorter than length of the baseball season (which, I think, is one of the most lovely measurements of time) makes this piercingly true for me. Anyway, I suppose all of this is another way of saying: this podcast is about the things that really matter and it's wonderful and true.

So. Love and love and love, and go for it always, and don't do the thing where you hold back or be frivolous with it or take it for granted because I promise 1) it's not worth it and 2) why in god's name would you want to do something so important in half-steps.