"This Is the First Day of My Last Days"

It’s been quite a while since I added anything to the Wright Rants but, if Christie’s actually posting blogs now, I should too. So, why have I been lax with my postings? Well…

Recently, I started taking classes online through Ashford University in an attempt to finally finish my BA. Last night, I finished my first five-week class, Psychology 202: Adult Development and Life Assessment. This class is required for all Ashford students in the online Bachelors program. It’s intended to ease adult students back into college with easy papers and a curriculum that focuses on learning, aging and dealing with the various stages of life, including death, dying and bereavement.

Online discussions via bulletin boards are a big part of the classes at Ashford and one of the assigned topics for our discussion was to write about how we would handle our own impending demise. In her instructions for the post, our professor said:

If you knew that you were going to die in six months, ideally, what would those six months include?

This was my post:

“This is the first day of my last days”

If I were to find out today that I only had six months to live, the first thing I would do is get my lawyer working on an appeal. Then, while he was trying to get a stay, I would also have my family and friends write personal letters to the governor, begging for a pardon. They would all insist that, regardless of what the six witnesses said, I was not drunk, I was not wearing a belt of human finger bones and I certainly wasn’t waving a salad fork around while I ranted about how I could understand the language of groundhogs and they are not happy. I tell you, it was all self-defense.

Anyway, if possible, I would spend my last six months traveling with my wife. I would really like to go to London and Amsterdam. That was the trip we had planned for our honeymoon but we had to cancel it the week before the wedding. We have been talking about taking that trip for our fifth anniversary but, apparently, I only have half a year to live.

I used to think that, if I found out my death was imminent and I couldn’t bargain my way out of it, I would spend my remaining time writing twenty hours a day just to get out all the ideas that are trapped up in my head. I now realize that I probably would write very little and, if I did, it would be letters to my wife and friends. I want to be a writer because that’s something I would enjoy doing for a living, not because I particularly want to leave a vast written legacy.

More and more, I am finding that my wife and my family and my friends are what I live for. So I would probably spend my last days the way I enjoy spending my days now: Going to the movies with my wife, having dinner with my friends, playing with my dogs, etc…

Or I’d rob a bank and hightail it south of the border to a country without an extradition treaty.

- Lee