Holding on to smoke
The twin flames of transience and immersion
Your Five-Year Plan is a newsletter about embracing life’s profound uncertainty.
Maybe your own plans went up in flames; maybe you’re considering a big, scary leap. This is your trusty companion while you’re writing the next life chapter.
Welcome to the conversation—and to the adventure that unfolds when your plans go sideways. This is letter #41. ✨
Holding on to smoke
My mom died last Valentine’s Day, a detail I remember because her on-and-off boyfriend brought a dozen roses to her hospital room. An hour later: her last breath.
I brought the roses back to her empty house, keeping them until the petals curled at the edges and the stems slumped in their vase. Since then, I’ve ticked off a full year’s worth of holidays that hold grief where joy used to reside.
This past Christmas, I thought about the two-foot tree my brother and I placed by her hospice bedside, strung with rainbow lights and the garish salt-dough-and-tinfoil ornaments we’d made in preschool. Instead of a star on top, we used the tiny Santa hat my mom got from hospital staff when her December-baby son was born.
I found creative ways to spend these newly-bittersweet holidays. Red meat was my mom’s favorite food group, so I had a medium-rare flank steak to mark her birthday.
Valentine’s Day, though, felt trickier to navigate. What to do with a holiday whose saccharine displays of romantic love now sit alongside my most morbid memories?
Last month, a flier landed in my mailbox, inviting me to the immersive Imagine Monet exhibit; more than 200 of Monet’s paintings would be shown as 360° digital projections on sixteen-foot walls.
I’m not an art aficionado, but when I saw the opening date—February 14—I knew I had to buy tickets.
When the free-diving documentary The Deepest Breath landed on Netflix last July, I watched one scene before turning it off in horror.
The movie begins with Italian free-diver Alessia Zecchini plumbing the ocean’s depths for four minutes sans oxygen tank. As her world-record attempt unfolds, the only soundtrack is her heartbeat. Minutes pass; Alessia’s heartbeat slows to an excruciating crawl. When she breaks the surface, she is barely alive.
Involuntary tears slid from my eyes.
In my mom’s last days, I buzzed a nurse to her bedside after she skipped a breath, then gasped for air. The nurse reassured me that this was a normal part of dying. Still, witnessing this detail of life’s transience set off every evolutionarily-installed alarm bell in my system.
So watching someone choose to give up their breath? It was more than I could bear.
A few hours after turning off the movie, I woke up mid-nightmare and couldn’t go back to sleep.
Even before my mom died, I generally resented reminders of life’s inherent impermanence. Sure, I can accept the reality of transience. Doesn’t mean I have to like it!
One under-discussed post-breakup loss is that of shared destinations. When I got divorced, I lost Lake O’Hara.
Lake O’Hara still exists, of course; it’s an alpine paradise in the Canadian Rockies, just west of the British Columbia-Alberta border. My ex-husband and I were lucky to visit; maintaining this pristine wilderness requires tight restrictions on human access. If you’re lucky enough to go someday, you’ll speak about it afterwards with reverence, too.
It’s my favorite place on earth, and it’s also intertwined with the story of a marriage that dissolved.
For that reason, I’ll probably return only in memories: ones as crisp as the late-June snow that fell on my final day there, and as sweet as the addictive carrot cake hikers buy at its day shelter—each square topped with a single perfect blackberry.
A decade ago, I stumbled across Jules Supervielle’s poem “Le regret de la terre.” Supervielle is apparently a three-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but also just obscure enough that all English translations of his work seem…questionable.
This line stuck with me anyway, accurately translated or not: “Le temps où nous ne pouvions attraper la fumée.” At that time we never could take hold of smoke.
In all the years since, I haven’t found a more pithy encapsulation of this truth: attempting an end-run around transience is futile.
In my book, the only consolation comes from being immersed in these transient moments. Full immersion allows us—years later—to recall each curve of the trail we walked, and to recover and reclaim the essence of things that slipped away.
Before entering the Imagine Monet exhibit, viewers walk through a hall lined with educational placards describing his life story and artistic approach: the context that helps us appreciate what we’re about to see.
Usually, this kind of thing is written by the most arrogant art-history snobs imaginable, but these felt blessedly accessible. One of my favorite placards—titled “Monet, an immersive painter”—read:
Monet seeks to capture the ephemeral: that light, that feeling, and that reality of the moment. The frame is done away with. You can then imagine a painting which would no longer be limited, extending itself beyond the canvas.
Monet immersed himself in painting the Water Lilies series in the wake of personal tragedy. In his words, he wanted to immerse viewers in “a wave with no horizon and no shore; … to whoever entered it, the room would provide a refuge of peaceful meditation in the middle of a flowering aquarium.”
Monet’s art may have been digitized and reimagined for this exhibit, but “a flowering aquarium” was exactly what it provided.
For thirty minutes, immense versions of his life’s work—accompanied by peaceful classical music—washed over the hushed gathering of attendees, each of us alone and together in quiet contemplation.
We often worry that immersion, especially in something we know will end, will feel like being engulfed—which explains why so many of us opt to resist it. But absent resistance, immersion can feel much gentler, like being enveloped.
Immersion may be the best salve for the painful reality of impermanence. But sometimes I question whether what I’ve lost is truly gone.
Before I left for the Monet exhibit, I texted my aunt—my mom’s sister—to ask how she was doing.
She sent back a photo of a Mary Oliver poetry book held open to “The Journey”; she’d seen it quoted on Instagram and pulled it off her shelf. When she did, its pages fell open to reveal an old birthday note from my mom.
“Deb is certainly here,” my aunt said.
Last September—two months after my free-diving nightmare—my eyes opened again at 3 a.m., full of tears. This time, I took a deep breath, and was surprised to hear the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” playing soundlessly in my ears.
The universe holds everything we have and everything we’ve lost: all matter, energy, space, and time. Everything’s in flux in the expanding cosmos, and yet nothing’s going to change my world. Which truth prevails quite literally depends on our perspective.
My perspective, I suppose, comes courtesy of John Lennon and Paul McCartney: limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns.
💬 An invitation to reflect
To allow extra space for my own reflection, I’ve turned off comments on today’s letter. But I invite you to consider this: what is your relationship with transience and immersion?
I hope that question is a reminder to carry some introspective energy forward today. ❤️
Warmly,
Maddie