#35 — How Do You Keep Loving People When You're the One They're Going to Lose?
This week's caller has known since they were eight years old that their life would look different from everyone else's.
They were diagnosed with a terminal illness in childhood, one that affects every part of their body and has no cure. They have spent their entire life since then learning how to exist fully inside that reality, not in spite of it, not around it, but right in the middle of it.
They are an actor. A writer. Someone who loves sharks and rescues snails and keeps a pet millipede and has strong opinions about how terminally ill people are written in fiction. They are also one of the most alive people you will ever hear in a conversation about death.
This is not a conversation about dying. It is a conversation about what it means to choose life when you have always known it has a shorter window than most. About the guilt of loving people you know you are going to leave. About the difference between being afraid of death and being afraid of the process of getting there. About what it looks like to say yes to a play, a trip, a friendship, a relationship, knowing full well what it might cost you.
It is also, genuinely, a fun conversation. Which somehow makes it land harder.
Book recommendations: Reverie by Ryan La Sala; I Fell in Love with Hope by Lancali
If you’d like to watch this conversation instead of just listening, you can find the video version on YouTube.
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