End of Life: Who Chooses When?

Some of us get five years. Some of us get eighty-five. A rare few get more than a hundred. And not one of us gets to see the number beforehand. Nobody handed us a receipt at birth. There's no warranty card; no expiration date printed on the heel of a foot.

So, who decides? Is it God, writing each length in a ledger we'll never see? Fate? Biology — a lottery of genes? Chance, or a thousand small decisions made by people who never knew they were deciding anything? Or is there no "who" at all? I don't know. I'm not going to pretend to know. But I can't stop asking, and I suspect I'm not alone.

"That's Not Fair"

Somewhere early — before we even have the words for it — we absorb a belief that life is supposed to be fair. Good things should happen to good people. Children should grow up. Grandparents should get to tell the same three stories at Thanksgiving until everyone can recite them from memory.

Where did we get that idea? Not from experience. Maybe from each other — from parents who split the last cookie down the middle, from every adult who said life isn't fair while behaving as though it should be. We build small systems of justice around our children and mistake them for the architecture of the universe.

Then something happens that violates that order completely. A diagnosis. An accident. A phone call in the middle of the night. And the first thing out of our mouths is: "That's not fair." A child's protest, spoken by grown adults with mortgages and decades of wisdom. Because that childhood conviction never dies: the scale should balance. The young should bury the old, never the reverse.

Why Them? Why Not Me?

Fairness isn't an abstraction. It has names and faces. The man who ran five miles a day and ate kale — gone at fifty-one. The neighbor who smoked for sixty years and lived to ninety-four, sharp as a tack. One person survives an illness and gets forty more years; another walks in for a routine checkup and walks out with a life changed forever.

We ask: Why them? But underneath burns a question we're ashamed to say aloud: Why not me? Why did I get yesterday — the burnt toast, the traffic, the complaints about weather — while someone who deserved more mornings got none? Survivor's guilt isn't only for disasters. If you've been alive a while, you've outlasted people who deserved to outlast you.

Living With the Question

Humanity has produced magnificent attempts at an answer: God's plan, fate, hidden reasons, or the honest admission that the universe isn't a moral accountant. Each brings real comfort to real people, and none settles the question. Maybe they aren't answers at all — maybe they're the ways we've learned to live with the question. Perhaps that's what wisdom is: not possessing an answer but discovering a way to keep standing while the question remains.

This past week, Central Oregon was given another terrible reason to ask. Children died. I won't write about how — this isn't a story about how. But one thought kept circling: Why did they get so few years? Long enough to lose a tooth, to have a best friend, to love dinosaurs. Not long enough for anything else. The order was wrong, and no explanation makes it less wrong.

The Dash Between the Dates

Every gravestone carries two dates, and between them a tiny dash. But that dash is the whole thing: every argument and apology, every hand held in a hospital room, every song sung badly in a car. A dash doesn't measure length — it measures what happened inside it.

You cannot choose the years on either side. But inside the dash, there is some say. Who you loved. Who you forgave. Whether you said I'm sorry. Whether you said I love you while the person who needed to hear it could still hear it. The people who loved those children don't speak about the missing years. They speak about what was in the dash. Small dashes. Filled completely.

Getting Through the Crisis

If you or someone you love is carrying this kind of grief right now, please know you don't have to carry it alone. The Redmond Senior Center offers a grief counseling class and a wellbeing series designed to help people navigate exactly these kinds of crises — moments when the questions feel heaviest and the ache sharpest. Sometimes the first step toward living with an unanswered question is simply sitting with others who are asking it too.

What Am I Going to Do With the Time I Have?

I've spent my life asking why did they die? But there's a stranger, harder question: Why do any of us get to live as long as we do? Nobody guaranteed me yesterday. I received it anyway. And precisely because tomorrow isn't owed to us, it's a gift.

So maybe the better question isn't How much time do I get? but What am I going to do with the time I have? I woke up this morning. Nobody promised me that. I think I'll try to be worthy of it.