Susan Olmstead Wang

During the memorial service of a dear friend, C, on the West Coast today, I got the news that a young physician acquaintance, A, on the East Coast had also died. They were both kind and brilliant and their parting message was the same: make every opportunity to mend broken relationships and prioritize your loved ones now.

The pandemic had a role in their deaths. My friend was over seventy and had suffered 18 months of serious and complicated health problems, some of which were exacerbated by the stresses on the healthcare system from COVID. My young physician acquaintance seemed to have given in to despair having served throughout the pandemic with still more deaths to come. The extreme (acute) and long term (chronic) stress for medical workers seemed invisible to people who “done with” COVID before it was “done with” relentlessly seeking ever more human hosts in which to replicate itself.

The life choices and paths of C and A were quite different. She had been my friend and prayer partner for decades. She was a vibrant Christian, new widow, devoted mother of two grown children, grandmother of five darlings, and brilliant lawyer. He was a brilliant physician, talented musician who could write and sing anything, and devoted fiancé. She adored Jesus and had a very real sense was that heaven would be her eternal home. As far as I know, he did not share such a belief.

What they shared was urgency about the NOW. They encouraged us all to prioritize and enjoy our loved ones now. To do what we can to repair any breach with or estrangement from a loved one as soon as possible before death deprives us of our chance. After death and such a missed opportunity, we may struggle and achieve some peace in our own hearts, but there’s no chance for laughing together like we did when we were close. No chance for sorting out the misunderstanding that caused the rift — Do we even remember? No chance for comforting each other in present or future experiences.   Our bad words and theirs likely contributed to the breach; let’s be brave now and use our good words to unbreak any breach.

As a sincere but sometimes misguided person, I did not carefully prioritize my most beloved people and I let breaches sit. Like many energetic and capable youths, I thought I had unlimited time to take care of everyone and every problem. Even though my parents and older brother died young, I still did not get it. I let my energy flow out without plan, priority, or perceiving the true and submerged cost to those I love the most. I spent a lot of time with (and “working on”) people whom I did not particularly like because I was trying to be polite. I wished them well, listening at length to their rants about “who done them wrong,” but they exhausted me. Did I think I was counseling them? Did I not know that I could or should exit a conversation that repeated endlessly? I was enacting a role model from my 1960s past in which “nice girls try to please everyone.” 

But, who was I missing when I spent time that way? Did I shortchange those I love more expecting that they would “understand” that so-and-so “needed” me? I was blind to the “time budget” that defines our lives. We arrive on earth with a LITERAL expiration date – if that date were printed on our ‘label’, I daresay we would all live differently! Yet we continue to think that we have unlimited time in which to do all things, fix all things. We falsely believe that “sixty years old is the new forty” or “eighty is the new sixty.” We operationalize this idea by buying more than we can use in a lifetime, denying our own aging, delaying reconciliation, and imagining that our most important relationships can wait.

I am grateful to C and to A for their beautiful lives and for the enduring lessons they bequeathed: understand the brevity and value of life, speak up to those you love, unbreak broken places, and direct hurting people to loving communities beyond (but including) your own isolated, exhausted self.

*break and breach have the same Old English root – bhreg-