Olivia Strauss Is Running Out of Time

by Angela Brown

It was just that sometimes it felt important to remember the person you used to be and the person you’d once told yourself you’d eventually become.

“Just because you have a good life doesn’t mean you can’t still long to change some parts of it.” She squeezed my hand. “You can still want some things you never got for yourself.”

“I don’t want to be remembered as some tired, overbooked, boring suburban woman who never took the damn time to become the best version of herself.”

That was the thing I was learning about death. Once you acknowledged that it was coming, you didn’t have time to feel afraid anymore.

Their answers were different and yet the same. They wanted time. To make good on old grudges. To relive their favorite days. To laugh. To love. Not one of them spoke about uprooting her whole life, of starting over or tearing down walls or chasing old professional ambitions or turning everything in her world on its head. Rather, every woman’s dying wish was to simply spend her final days—however many of them she had left—being able to exist in the simple quietness of her life. To have more time to enjoy and appreciate the beauty in that.

I take greater value in the simplicity of my daily routine.”

Life is so strange. At times, it feels so lonely, like we’re isolated with our flaws and fears.

That I could be content, yet still have dreams.

we aren’t born with one life, but with two. The life we live before we understand loss, and the one we finally live once we realize that, despite our many efforts, our life will ultimately end.

I still had a chance to move forward. To break my old patterns. To revise the trajectory of my life. To start over. To try again.