Chapter Two: Sixteen Hundred Fifty Seven

Plausible Ambiguity

We all live with something I call plausible ambiguity — the quiet lie we tell ourselves about our own finite nature. The same way people joke, “If I get hit by a bus…” as if death is a hypothetical event instead of a certainty.

Well, here’s the truth:
No matter how smart you are, how much money you have, how carefully you curate your social circles, how exclusive the club you joined, or how insulated you believe your world to be — we’re all going to get hit by a bus someday. The only question is when.

This book isn’t “about me,” but I’m the only one left who remembers that time. And back in 2010, at 47 years old, I still lived inside that plausible ambiguity. I was about to turn 48 that November. It was March. And up until then, a bus would’ve needed to come out of nowhere to knock me out of the story.

I was a social dissector — judging this person, avoiding that one, playing the country-club hierarchy, believing in subtle gradations of “people like us.” And of course, there were people who wouldn’t hang out with me either. That’s how stratification works.

At the top, there are fantasies — people none of us truly know but many of us strive to emulate. And until 47, I had never questioned why. I was simply a striver. And I was achieving what I thought I was supposed to achieve.

We planned our lives like many couples do. And because we had traveled the Caribbean since the one crazy answer to a serious question in early 1995 — the islands were part of our rhythm. I can’t count how many times we went.

But the story that matters starts here.

When I began seeing Brenda, she was eleven years older than me — twelve, depending on the month. I was 34 turning 35. She was 45 turning 46. By early 1995, we finally went out on a formal date. And by mid-spring, something had shifted. I was smitten. And I think she was too, though she’d never have said it then. The age difference bothered her more than it ever bothered me.

But eventually we arrived at the moment every forming relationship meets:
Are we doing this or not?

She was still going on the occasional date, but people already saw us as a pair. There comes a point where ambiguity becomes a bit uncomfortable. And I finally said it one night at her home:

“Hey, this has to stop. Are we going to see if this works the way we think it might? I think it’s time we not see other people.”

I asked her, “What do you want to do?” Seemed a simple question. On topic for sure.

Our humor was already in place by then, and without missing a beat — and with absolutely no relation to anything we were talking about or had ever even thought about — she said:

“I wanna go to Jamaica.” And just like that, the islands became our thing.

A perfect avoid. We laughed. And four days later, we were in Silver Sands, Jamaica, where Claudette made sure our stay was magic.

We left Jamaica committed to making this thing real.
But even then, we were not home free. There would be a few more twists and turns to us finding our life completely together. But we made it.

So it goes that at 47, turning 48, I was becoming a person who—at least for a time—could give and receive unconditional love with full awareness that we were heading toward an end. I think at some level you have to get into that state of mind. Eventually you will have to become a rock and be there and not only know you need to be there but want to be there. You will have to cast aside many things. You may even have to make choices trusting in the universe that you make the right choices. Jobs are expendable at times of need. And even then, I knew I might still go first. There was no more it has to be a bus. Her bus was coming, and she saw it. My bus was coming, too, and for the first time I had a clearer vision of what I should not have done to that point—and maybe what she shouldn’t have either. More on that. We say things we shouldn’t and we fret too much over from which end one squeezes the toothpaste. Many things will fall by your wayside in the light of what real life means.

Because on that November 2009 trip, when we were visiting the islands, we were working a plan like so many couples do: buy the home in the Caribbean, visit often, retire there as soon as we could. And we came close. Very close. (Side note: the house we almost bought is still for sale 16 years later.)

But neither of us knew that March 10, 2010 was Day One of the 1,670 days she had left.

Looking back, the greatest truth I’ve learned is this: you can lose your plausible ambiguity about death for a while—you can be cracked open by reality and see your own ending clearly—but if you’re otherwise healthy, you will eventually drift back into denial. Humans can’t maintain that level of clarity forever.

I’ve slipped back into it myself. I try to return to that clarity, because when I sit in the truth of my own finite nature, I am a better man. A better human. It strips away the nonsense. It returns me to who I actually am, not who I’m performing.

Because none of what we achieve matters. Only what we give. Only what we leave behind in the hearts of a very small number of people.

Everyone is on a years-long plan—sometimes decades long—and they use every excuse in the book to keep doing what they do. And what they do is often nowhere close to who they really are.

But here’s what we knew with certainty: we did not have 3,650 days to follow some polished five- or ten-year plan. That’s why we moved to the beach in 2011. We chose life over strategy. Presence over performance. Days that mattered over years we might not get.

And that’s what I want you to hear before we close this chapter: you are going to die. So am I. So is everyone you love. There is no version of your life where you outrun that truth. It is the measure of a person, however, of how they give their life when the life of another is going to be cut shorter than expected.

This need not be us, however. It need not be torment to live nor your wish to die.

Because you can’t outrun regret. Or is it more about coming to see regret for what it is. Life and circumstances take you on a journey and as Stephen Colbert so aptly has said “You can’t pick and choose the things you are grateful for.” Paul Edgecomb has a particularly hard task and harder than I have faced for sure. And Stephen King explores ambiguity for what it would become if a bus was never to come. And as we get into more depth I want you to know, that in time as we found footing, Brenda lived those days. We lived them. Forward with Hope. More on that too I am sure.

Nothing matters more than life, joy, and the people you choose to be connected to while you still have the chance.

This is what Day One taught me. And it’s what the next sixteen hundred Sixty-nine days confirmed, one breath and one choice at a time.