Dear Marissa,
This letter isn’t for Mom, it’s for you. It’s so you can see how far you’ve come. A record of how proud I am of you. That this space isn’t just for healing hurt from the past, it’s to honor the grief and love you’ve been through for the future. Here it goes.
When Mom died, there was so much life left to live for her. Things she wanted to do, places she wanted to see. Milestones she was meant to be a part of. It didn’t matter. Time made its choice and took her and everything with it. That night as the world shattered, 17 year old Marissa thought, “time doesn’t belong to you. It’s fleeting and finite.”
The next four years will be trying to reconcile with the idea of time. Why do some people get 100 years and some get 56? Others get even less. You will eventually come to the conclusion that we are all living on borrowed time. Time belongs to no one.
Then one day you’ll find yourself strapped to a hospital bed, wondering if you were ever meant to have time on this Earth in the first place. That you weren’t someone who was supposed to have the next 80 years of their life. The universe gave time to the wrong person.
Every minute you live after being given a second chance at life feels like time you do not deserve. Why should you, someone who would willingly give up their time, exist when so many others have had their time stolen from them? It feels like you have to re-earn the right to be alive. To prove your worth and that you will make the most of every second given to you.
Suddenly it feels like someone started a timer in a race you didn’t know you were running. Graduate college. Get a job. Move up in your career. Meet someone. Move in together. Get engaged. Get married. Buy a house. Have a family. Do all of these things and then you’ve proven you’ve made the most of your life. You succeeded.
You’ll do everything you can to make all these things happen and yet life will take you in completely different directions. You watch your friends and family cross these supposed, “milestones” and think you’ve fallen behind. Society says you need to work harder and move faster or you will never “finish.” Each time you got so close to what felt like the next step and it didn’t work out, you were crushed. Question what you should’ve done differently. You could not bear to face the younger versions of ourselves. It felt like you had failed them. Failed to accomplish the things you were supposed to, for us.
There will be a long period of time where you’ll believe you don’t deserve these things. They are not meant for you. And then when you least expect it, you’ll be closer to that finish line than you’ve ever been before. You think you’ve caught up to where you are supposed to be. That you did what you should’ve with the time you had to earn. Just when you think you’ll get all the things society and yourself told you you wanted, the world will crumble around you again. That future will be ripped away. You think this is your undoing. It will end up being your becoming.
Think of yourself like a lovingly used car. We put thousands of miles on ourselves moving through life at a speed we think allows us to accomplish as much as possible. When the car stops working or something breaks, we’ll swap out a part or do a quick fix and keep going. Who has time for more than that? One day you’ll need a repair so big that the only way you can keep going is if you take apart the entire car. It is terrifying being in pieces. Being afraid that you’ll never be the same. But when you look at yourself in those pieces you’ll learn what truly needs to be repaired. What fits where and what parts may no longer be serving you. Maybe there are parts you didn’t even realize needed work. And when you put yourself back together, you will be an even stronger, more whole version of yourself than you ever thought you could be.
Becoming this version of yourself will teach you something important. If you stop racing between milestones, time slows. You stop counting the years. Years become months. Months become days. You realize how much time exists between the milestones you thought were so important. Hundreds of thousands of moments that matter just as much. You start counting life by these different kinds of moments. The number of minutes you laughed so hard your stomach hurt. The number of seconds you take off your mile as you run faster and stronger. The number of hours that pass talking on the couch with a friend. The number of weeks you worked really hard on that badass presentation. The number of days filled with good dinners, singing in the kitchen, hangovers from gin martinis, cute outfits, heartfelt phone calls, cathartic sad movie crys, dancing in the bar till your feet hurt. All of that time adds up to something even more meaningful than a checklist of things you thought you needed to accomplish. It adds up to a life lived. And a life loved.
Today I am reclaiming our time. Not time that we had to earn. Time that we deserve. I am reclaiming every minute we told ourselves we didn’t deserve to live, every second we spent thinking the people in our life would be better off without us. Every day I thought we were behind as we scrolled through the engagements and baby announcements on social media. I am taking all of that time and turning it into opportunity. That “making the most of time” means making as many memories as possible for us and with the people we love.
I give this time back to you and the younger versions of ourselves. You may have thought you failed them, but they never failed us. They protected us, believed in us, and got us to where we are today. And for them I am grateful. For them, we choose to live. On a timeline that is no one’s but our own.
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