Last week I entered a website called "The Death Clock," which describes itself as thus: "the Internet's friendly reminder that life is slipping away . . . second by second. . . . [t]he Death Clock will remind you just how short life is." http://deathclock.com The Death Clock provides you the exact date of your death, after calculating your responses to seven short questions. It was with no small amount of trepidation that I pressed the "calculate" button after answering the questions. My date of death: September 10, 2037. And lest you undermine the significance of the date provided, underneath it there is a rapidly diminishing number representing the seconds you have left to live. This jolted me. 2037 is just around the corner. I quickly did the math and realized that in 2037, I will be 79 years old. That is far less than the 90-100 years I had hoped to attain (in the best of health, of course). I will not even live as long as my parents have, so far! After my initial alarm and reminding myself of the implausibility of the calculation—for better or worse—I began to more meditatively turn this supposed fact over in my mind. 22.5 more years. 20 of those years retired from my so-called career. Having lost a couple of dear friends in their 50's to gruesome cancers in recent years, and my mostly helpless involvement in the painful spectacle that is the advanced stage 4 pancreatic cancer of another friend who is only 50 years old, having 20 or so hopefully productive years (and I judge this by my parents' health in the years leading up to age 79) seems in many ways like a gift. Twenty years to enjoy family and friends; see my children thrive as adults and enjoy the grandchildren I am already imagining; live completely as I choose once I have broken free from the fetters of said career; travel the world with my husband so long as a modicum of good health permits; and invest my reclaimed energy (post-retirement) in doing my part to repair the world. As the recent and imminent losses of loved ones have shown, I should be so lucky to have even this much more time.
While I recognize that the Death Clock is an unlikely Cassandra (and it would thus be fitting if I refused to believe it and dismissed it completely), who knows? However hackneyed my response to it might be, this prognostication shifted something in my psyche. It has been a week now since I got the results, and it enters my mind frequently. In response, I find myself going about my daily activities more consciously. Perhaps short-lived, but if the end result of the Death Clock's prediction is an increased mindfulness on my part, then it is a worthwhile addition to my re-launched meditation practice not to mention my remaining years.
