Live like you were dyin'

Kirby Puckett was my age. A few years ago we lost a friend to hemorrhagic stroke. He'd just gotten married a few weeks before, and was out walking with his bride when he dropped. Just like that, he was gone.

I heard a country song on the radio last night, "Live Like You Were Dying." The narrator is talking to a fellow who "got the news" and "spend hours staring at the x-rays." Narrator asks, "Man, what'd you do?" and he lists a bunch of things, such as"finally opened up the Good Book" "became the husband I wasn't often enough." The chorus was, "I went skydiving, Rocky Mountain climbin', I went two-point-seven seconds on a bull named Fu Manchu. I spoke sweeter, loved deeper .... Son, I hope you get the chance to live like you were dying'."

Ah - here's a link. (Mind the popups.) Gotta love Google.

A great sentiment, live like you were dying. That assumes of course, that you have advance notice of your demise. But as we saw with our friend Angus and now with Kirby, you don't always get that "two-minute warning."

George Elliot, the martyred missionary depicted in the recent film "End of the Sword", had this to say about living on the edge of death: "It's never too late to become the person you might have been." And, "Live your life so that when the time comes to die, all you have to do is die."

Advice worth taking.