Live Your Dash!

As Samuel Johnson noted, “When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” Most people won’t ever face the hangman, but everyone will die, despite all efforts to deny that fact. In researching their new book, Belmont University president Bob Fisher and his wife, Judy, visited a place where denying death is no longer an option: Alive Hospice. They questioned 104 people about the lessons that life and impending death had taught them. The result is Life Is a Gift: Inspiration From the Soon Departed (Hachette, 218 pp., $19.99).

One visit to the self-help section of any bookstore offers proof that many people are looking for meaning and fulfillment. Still, most of them will go through their days like robots, doing the same things over and over, imagining that some magic day in the future things will change for them, presumably for the better. The hospice patients the Fishers interviewed, by contrast, understood that only one change was coming for them. They had reached an acceptance of death, but they had learned to appreciate the life they had left, and they welcomed the time to reflect on their past.

There are no great surprises here, and the authors admit that sometimes the lessons in this book can sound trite or obvious. Most patients confirmed the old saying that no one on his death bed wishes he had spent more time at the office. They were proudest of their families: being in happy marriages, raising good children and playing with their grandchildren. Their regrets also tended to center on families: not being around for the kids, or staying too long in bad marriages.

What the Fishers mainly found were people who had little time for pettiness or old grudges, people who still found purpose for their lives. At 98 and with only a few weeks to live, John B. was learning Hungarian, a lifelong dream. There was a Hungarian-speaking woman in residence at the hospice, and he wanted to speak with her in her native tongue. As the Fishers point out, “He might have said, ‘I’m ninety-eight. I’m at death’s door. I guess I’ve missed my chance to learn Hungarian.’ Instead he said, ‘I’m ninety-eight. I’m at death’s door. I guess I better get busy, or I’ll miss my chance to learn Hungarian.’ ”

Though most of the patients in the book were hoping for heaven in the Christian sense, their simple but powerful message ultimately transcends the specifics of religion. As patient James B. advised: “Live your dash.” He meant that people should fill with life the space on a tombstone that represents the time between the year of birth and the year of death. Reading this book, many readers will be grateful to the dying people who took time to remind them of what’s really important.