The Surge
The body saves its brightest hour for the end.
Some hospice nurses call it the surge. Others call it the rally.
Someone who hasn’t spoken in days opens her eyes and knows every face in the room. She says their names. She asks for her favorite food and sits up to eat it. The family starts making phone calls, because she’s coming back.
She isn’t. Researchers call it terminal lucidity. It tends to arrive in the final hours or days, it can last a few minutes or a couple of days, and nobody can fully explain it. Everyone who has witnessed it agrees on one thing: whatever that was, it was in there the whole time.
I have always been fascinated by this. So alive and lucid right before passing. Like a last hurrah!
(If you have sat beside someone during theirs, you know it is a gift and a heartbreak at once. I’m writing this with you in mind.)
You can probably guess the lesson. Don’t wait. Life is short. You’ve seen it on coffee mugs and nodded along at funerals, and it hasn’t moved you an inch. Knowing it was never the problem.
We tell ourselves we’re saving our best for later. We’re too busy, the money isn’t there, the timing is wrong. But look at what the saving actually buys.
An unspent self can’t fail.
As long as the book isn’t written, it might be brilliant. As long as the trip isn’t taken, it might be perfect. As long as you haven’t tried, “I could have” sits polished on a shelf where nobody can judge it, including you.
My confession
I have always been frugal, because I was always just getting by. I was a single mom. I’d rather shop at Goodwill, to the horrific embarrassment of my kid, so I’d have money for what I really wanted: experiences. Travel. Nice horses to bring along, train and compete. Sailing and skydiving. Surfing, pastel painting, growing fruit trees. Things that filled my soul bucket. To feel alive. To show my daughter the world.
I gave up nice things. Trips with anyone else. Going out with friends. Having money to buy a house. All of it went into the bills, raising a child, and training and competing horses. I never had nice cars or things. Things didn’t matter to me. Experiences did.
I remember at one particularly low point I was so broke the bank was going to charge me a $35 overdraft fee because I was 34 cents over. I frantically searched the couch cushions and the car seats for 34 cents, so I wouldn’t get charged the extra $35 I didn’t have. What a racket. I scrounged the pennies up and squeaked by, barely.
The hard part was that I was so frugal I stopped living during the planning and waiting phase. I was always hesitant to jump in with both feet, because of all the self “lack talk.” I can’t spend this kind of money right now, not a good time, for x, y, z reasons, blah blah blah.
It is never a good time.
“I can’t, because” is the most convincing voice in the room. I couldn’t do things because I was raising a child on my own. So I decided to start with things we could both do: beach weekends at Best Westerns with a AAA discount, where we could fly a kite on the beach at sunset. Horse show camping in our trailer. Irish dance classes, Brownie Scouts, improv classes, all of it. I was always dragging her hither and yon.
There’s no private jet on that list and no five-star resort. Just a discount motel and a kite. The surge was never about how much you spend. It’s about whether you spend it at all.
Those little trips filled my soul, and they encouraged me to save for bigger trips and adventures. My first real yes was sailing classes. I realized that someday is now, and there is so much out there to do! I got smarter with budgeting, logistics and travel hacks, and that allowed a new life.
Saving money for something has a destination and a date. Saving yourself for someday has neither.
Save your money if you have to. Never save yourself.
Spent
My daughter will tell you to this day that when we go on our big trips — Europe, Jamaica, Mexico — we do all the discovering stuff non-stop, and by the end we’re completely exhausted and spent.
Spent.
Snorkeling with chromatic sea-life and watching a sunset in Jamaica. Stair climbing in Cinque Terra for the incredible views. Swimming with giant whale sharks in Mexico. Hugging each other when we both made it safely back to earth after skydiving.
We are taught to arrive at the end with reserves: money still in the account, energy held back, the good dress unworn, the true thing unsaid. We call that prudence. But the woman in the hospice bed shows us what all that saving was for.
When the surge comes, she spends every last drop on the people she loves and the food she craves. She doesn’t wait for more money, more energy, or a better time.
The tragedy isn’t dying tired.
It’s dying full of everything you saved and never spent.
You know how much money you have. You can check the balance any time you like. Nobody can show you the balance on your time. You only know it’s less than yesterday. A woman of fifty-nine has, on average, about 1,330 Sundays left.
This week’s thought experiment
Imagine you’re given your surge now: one week of perfect clarity and full strength, and after that, nothing. Take some time throughout this week to ponder what you’d do with it. Who you’d call. What you’d finally say. Where you’d go. What you’d ask to eat. Or write it down, if it helps.
Then, for each one, ask yourself the real reason you haven’t done it yet. Notice how many of those reasons are about protecting something: your money, your image, your timing, your “I could have.”
Then choose one. Not the biggest. The one with the weakest excuse. Put a date on the calendar. A date is what turns saving into a surge.
What are you saving yourself for?
— Dame Eileen
Next Sunday: Frake This!
