If I Die, I Will Miss….

Posted on July 25, 2003 in Writing Exercises

At the Wednesday writing group, I broke the ice with an exercise in which we wrote down those things that we would miss when we were dead. Here are mine:

• I will miss running my hand down Lynn’s arm while she sleeps.
  
• I will miss hearing Lynn laugh.
  
• I will miss watching Lynn making points with her hands like she was making bread loaves.
  
• I will miss sitting in a cafe, on a porch, just sitting in a mood that feels like haze layered under stratus under the blue sky.
  
• I will miss the feeling of driving very fast through Nevada, feeling like a runner with his chest shoved forward, his head fallen back.
  
• I will miss visiting the zoo with my friends and Lynn.
  
• I will miss the rhinos ambling across the enclosures.
  
• I will miss the breeze that comes suddenly and brief on a hot day.
  
• I will miss cloud breaks, the sudden eruption of blue.
  
• I will miss prickly manroot melons.
  
• I will miss open skies, cathedral ceilings, and sheets over my head.
  
• I will miss my cats staring at me.
  
• I will miss going through customs as I enter strange lands for the first time, learning something about their attitudes and the way they carry themselves.
  
• I will miss the sound of my own voice, reciting the poetry of T.S. Eliot.
  
• I will miss the panic before departure, the mad search for my keys.
  
• I will miss the breathing of a small cat, reciprocating the motions of my chest.
  
• I will miss laughing with my friends, making jokes, seeing their eyes and their teeth.
  
• I will miss sitting around for no reason.
  
• I will miss the way that the pain that has been accumulating in my calves and my chest suddenly goes away as I reach my destination, take the footstep that brings me to the peak.
  
• I will miss seeing the afternoon sun on my windowsill.
  
• I will miss the pictures that others take of the places they live and I will miss sharing mine.
  
• I will miss writing.
  
• I will miss reading good books and poetry.
  
• I will miss eating brie and chocolate.
  
• I will miss drinking cold water on ice.
  
• I will miss the hair-thin squeak of hummingbirds and the dotting chirp of crickets.
  
• I will miss kind, honest people.
  
• I will miss life, but only if there is an afterlife.

To write such a list revives me. To revisit it comforts and energizes me especially after these last two days.

Sincere thanks to my wife, Lynn, for sticking with me, for being there. Thanks to the friends who comforted me by email and listened as I reexamined myself. Thank you to those who read and forebore. Thank you to those who let me be me.