Cheating Death

As I have mentioned recently in another post, within the last six or seven weeks my family has been to memorial services for five precious friends. The fragility of life has certainly been on my mind lately already, but was again brought back to the forefront this weekend when I received a text on Saturday from a friend of mine in Washington. She was in the hospital trying to recover from a heart attack. She was not only suffering from congestive heart failure, but the damage to her heart and descending aorta was so severe that her kidneys had shut down due to insufficient blood supply and she was in renal failure. On top of that, there was a blood clot in her heart causing further complications. The doctors are convinced her time is very short.

Trying to find the silver cloud in all of this, my friend mentioned she had “at least made it past 70,” which was longer than either of her parents had lived. This statement got me thinking, especially after we got off the phone and the news sunk in. No one cheats death. It gets us eventually. But I don’t believe it’s as cut and dry as that.

While we can’t escape death – I think we can all agree on that – we are not helpless. In a way, we can beat death – not cheat it, but beat it playing fair and square. And not by living longer, but by living better. Death will take each one of us and we don’t control the number of our days, but we can control how much life is infused in those days and the legacy we leave behind. We have a choice to live bigger and live better.

My friend is a retired university professor and invested in the futures of hundreds if not thousands of students. She is an author, enriching the lives of adults and children who read her work. She impacts everyone around her, and although her time here on earth may be coming to an end, the influence of her life will not because she sacrificed to better the lives of those around her. She lived better.

You can eat right, exercise and drive the speed limit, but you really can’t guarantee any of that will extend your days. That’s not a choice you get to make. The only choice you have is what you do with today. Will you live better? Will you live bigger? Beat death by leaving a legacy in the lives of others.