Another one that’s hard to pin down.

”Clean living.” That’s what my dad says.

The old man who smokes all the days of his life and dies peacefully in his sleep at 93?

“Clean living,” my dad might say with an eye roll.

Health is an honest value to choose. Health for me and for you. Healthy foods, healthy habits. Healthy minds and bodies.

At least we have our health. I can lose a lot and still have a lot if I have my health.

But boy, that can go sideways.

I think of my friend the artist. She lived her life clean. She avoided sugar, ate healthy, and walked fifty miles for her fiftieth birthday.

And then she got cancer and died. Quickly.

I think of my cousin, the Forester.

He finished his course of study and found a job in the woods somewhere. He got married and had a pair of real nice kids.

Then he got the flu and died of complications.

The flu! You hear that it kills people every year, but you don’t think it kills the strong.

It killed my strong, healthy cousin. He was an ox. He was a gem. He was beautiful and strong, and he died because of the flu.

My parents are all sick and beginning the process of moving on to the next stage.

For one, it’s dementia. For another, it’s chronic leukemia. For the others, it’s heart disease and diabetes.

This life can be cruel.

Oh, that we might all live to old age and die in our lover’s arms.

“We walked in and found them together, peaceful and gone.”

My friend Johnny lived until he was old.

He mowed the lawn one sunny morning. He came up on the porch and half-drained a glass of lemonade, and then he sat back in his chair and went to be with Jesus.

That is the dream. Death by lemonade. He died of too much satisfaction.

But we don’t get to choose.

My middle child was born with complications. They spent a month in the NICU in Portland, and then came home with us.

Their young life was punctuated by appointments and checkups, blood draws and urine samples and renal ultrasounds.

They are healthy and strong today—essentially no residual effects.

But years later, when our third child was nearly ready to be born, the doctor reading the ultrasound (who was also involved in our middle child’s birth) stopped and looked at the chart.

She asked if the older one had survived.

Survival is apparently uncommon for kids with our middle kid’s condition. And survival with no meaningful consequences is essentially unheard of.

We rolled the dice and won. We had the dice rolled for us. We did little more than blow on them.

And of course, my own wife is a cancer survivor.

We do not take our health for granted. Or if we do, we do so in folly.

I have experienced acute mental health issues in my lifetime. I think they’ve been with me all along, but it wasn’t really until my wife’s cancer diagnosis that they became untenable. Unmanageable. I am not a stranger to the darkest of thoughts.

Thoughts of how my family might be better off without me.

But my family rose to that occasion. My wife, my closest friends—they surrounded me and chained me to a deeper reality of our mycorrhizal connections.

I sought help and found it.

I am more attuned now to my mental health and more conscious of its delicacy.

Be well! Stay healthy!

As we’ve established o’er and o’er in this series, we have but one life for sure. And we don’t even know the length of that. Live your life fully and chew on the bones.

Drink in love where you find it and give as much as you get. Give a little more than you get.

Mind the mycorrhizae.

They are the only things holding us up.

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