Why No Exit

“After Michelangelo died, someone found in his studio a piece of paper on which he had written a note to his apprentice, in the handwriting of his old age, ‘Draw, Antonio, draw, and do not waste time.’”

From The Writing Life by Annie Dillard

If you haven’t seen Life as a House, I highly recommend it. It is sad but, at the same time, funny and inspiring. I usually don’t appreciate inspiring in a movie. When someone says that a movie they saw was inspiring, I immediately think overly affected and overly acted. I do not feel that way about Life as House.

The movie deals with death, the part of life which, in western society especially, most people view objectively and intellectually understand it as something that happens to all people but often do not subjectively apply to themselves. It Specifically focuses on the quickly approaching death of a middle aged architect, portrayed by Kevin Kline, and how the knowledge of his death impacts his life and the time he has left. The movie posits that, in a sense, he is lucky because he knows he will die soon and he has the luxury of spending quality time with those he loves most.

One of his main goals in the time he has left is to repair the relationship with his estranged adolescent son, portrayed by Hayden Christensen (in contrast to his stoic turn as Anakin Skywalker, he is emotionally fragile but believable). My favorite scene in the movie comes after the father has had a fair amount of success in rebuilding the relationship and the son discovers his father’s impending death. I don’t now recall the exact dialogue but the son is understandably upset and angry that his father is dying. He expresses the anger poorly by accusing the father of rebuilding the relationship merely because he is dying. His father’s response is, “We’re all dying, I just got moved to the front of the line.”

I think that line has more truth to it than any other I’ve ever heard in a movie. None of us know what the future holds for us or how much time we’ll be allowed. Anne Lamott describes it in Bird by Bird by saying that we are all on the same bus with the same final destination; however and whenever, we are all going to come to the end of this life.

I applied the intellectual knowledge of death to my own life when I was twenty-four. At that time, I was attending law school with a young man who had just served two years active duty in the air force. One day in a pick up basketball game he planted his foot to change direction and felt an extreme sharp pain in his hip. When he arrived at the hospital, the x-ray revealed that he had broken his hip. The doctors were immediately and gravely concerned because young people, in apparently good health, do not generally break their hips outside of some trauma. Further studies revealed that he had stage four bone cancer. Until the day he broke his hip, he didn’t have a clue that he was sick. In the middle of that afternoon, his life took a quick, tragic turn. After dropping out of law school and a short struggle with the disease, he died a few months later.

I never knew him well but happened to work with his fiancée. Before he died, I would ask her about him periodically and I was always struck by her positive attitude. I know she felt pain inside but for whatever reason, she chose not to show it, even when he died. It was brave of her but I was puzzled by it. One day I asked her how she was able to maintain such apparent joy. She responded that they were viewing each day as a blessing, making the most of it and enjoying it together.

Her response was exactly what I needed to hear because, when I heard about his cancer, I was scared. He was a young man. Young people are not supposed to have life threatening illnesses. For the first time in my life, I thought it could just as easily have been me. Her response made me realize that every day is in fact a gift and I better make the most of it. In the daily grind of life, sometimes it’s hard to remember but I try. Mostly, I try to be thankful for those I love, to be thankful for other blessings in my life whether they be small or great, and to not be wasteful with my time.

About the time my acquaintance from law school died, I was going through a Hemmingway phase and was reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. In it, Papa describes death as a passageway with no exit. I think it is a succinct but lyrical way to describe it. Whether it is appropriate or not, I now associate his description with my practical philosophy of daily life.