I’ve often thought about how not to die, thinking about unfinished business and lives cut too short. I’ve thought about losing people I loved long before their time and the terrible holes that their death left in so many lives, holes that will never be filled.

In my mind, I think of the course of someone’s life in the image of a woven fabric, a tapestry, colors bright and varied, designs unique to that individual and their life. When one dies after a long life, the fabric is worn from use and the threads are worn, gently unraveled by the course of time. But when life is cut short, whether by illness or trauma, the fabric is violently rent, the threads jagged, the hole one that can never be closed.

For a lot of years, my thesis around “how not to die” had to do with length of life and circumstances of someone’s death, the grief that I had felt first hand, the experiences I had lived through, particularly with the loss of my mother and my brother. My father’s death at 82, with his history of cardiac issues, was sad but not devastating in the same way. My grandmother, my aunts, all lived long lives and, by and large, died in ways that felt like the peaceful and natural order of things.

But I realize now that long lives don’t always mean that they end the way that we would want if we could choose. I would imagine that most, if not all, of us want to be healthy until the end comes. Better to go to sleep one night and not wake up, having lived fully until the moment of death. And, failing that, coming to terms with a physical being declining but retaining the ability to interact, to be ourselves, to say goodbye to those we love.

Sadly, it does not always work that way. So many people experience long and heartbreaking declines. So many, struggling with disease, can no longer be the person they were, can no longer express themselves, can no longer control any aspect of their life and environment.

I was talking with someone this week who is a caregiver for a 101 year old family member. She said, ruefully, that this loved one was “not a good 101,” and went on to say that her father had been “a good 101,” still cognitively intact until the end came. It is, like it or not, the luck of the draw and not something over which we have any control.

There is nothing easy about losing someone you care about, there is nothing easy about having that person change so much, due to disease or injury, that they feel like a stranger. It is, in many ways, a loss before the loss, grieving the person you knew even before you grieve their death.

Perhaps in the future there will be diagnostic science to tell us how and when our life will likely end. Perhaps we will have control over what we want and what we don’t. But, for now, we must accept that we do not know, we cannot know. We must realize and remember that every day is unique and non-repeatable, every opportunity a gift and every experience a way to continue to fill our full hearts.