I was on a gurney, waiting to be wheeled into surgery. My doctors were confident, and the odds were strongly in my favor, but even good odds are not certain, and my mind knew the difference. My wife, Naomi, had just stepped out of the room. Into that ordinary gap came a thought that would not leave my mind: what if that was it? What if “I’ll see you soon” turned out to be the last thing I ever said to her?
I have spent years teaching people how to write an ethical will, the document that carries not your assets but your values, the things you want your family to know before it is too late to say them. I tell people this work should not be put off. And there I was, realizing I had done exactly what I counsel everyone against. I had a computer full of drafts and reflections, an actual ethical will years in the making. And I realized that Naomi did not even know the password to unlock my laptop.
It struck me as darkly funny. I had spent years building something meant to carry my meaning forward, and I had built it where she couldn’t reach it.
There was no time to fix that properly, so I reached for my phone instead. In the minutes before they rolled me in, I typed. I won’t share what the email said, except that it wasn’t “I’ll see you soon.” It was only part of what I intended to say; time and fat fingers limited how much I could fit in. But I know the lessons marriage and life teach you over the years are rarely said out loud because you assume there will be a better moment. And my moment was now. I learned that the iPhone lets you delay delivery. I set it for 9:00 that night, timed for whichever version of that evening was coming: the one where I would explain the email away, or the one where it would have to explain me.
There is a teaching in Pirkei Avot: repent one day before you die. A student asks the obvious question: How is anyone supposed to know which day that is? The rabbi’s answer: You don’t. So live each day as though it might be that one.
I know this text. I teach it. I did not expect to feel it from the inside, with only a few minutes left to say what mattered.
The surgery went well. I am healing, grateful, and mostly back to my routines. Which is its own quiet warning, since routine is exactly what lets the mundane swallow the sacred again. When I woke, Naomi was there. I picked up my phone and deleted the email before she saw it.
I have thought about that deletion more than almost anything else from that day. I am glad “I’ll see you soon” turned out to be true. But part of me wonders whether I should have sent it anyway. Not because I was dying, but because it was true regardless of whether I lived.
