Life is short . . . I've always known this. Or almost always. I'vebeen living with mortality for decades, since my mother died ofovarian cancer when she was 40 and I was 19. And this is what Ilearned from that experience: that knowledge of our own mortality isthe greatest gift God ever gives us.
It is so easy to waste our lives: our days, our hours, ourminutes. It is so easy to take for granted the pale new growth on anevergreen, the sheen of the limestone on Fifth Avenue, the color ofour kids' eyes, the way the melody of a symphony rises and falls anddisappears and rises again. It is so easy to exist instead of live.Unless you know there is a clock ticking. So many of us changed ourlives when we heard a biological clock and decided to have kids. Butthat sound is a murmur compared to the toll of immortality.
From A Short Guide to a Happy Life
By Anna Quindlen
Smell the coffee. Smell the roses. Nobody ever said on hisdeathbed, "I wish I had spent more time at the office."
That's the message of the new book by Anna Quindlen, novelist,columnist, wife, mother and role model to a generation of women (andothers) who juggle family and career.
A Short Guide to a Happy Life (Random House, $12.95), with just 50pages of copy, is one of those little inspirational gift books withwide margins and photographs of children and waves rolling up a longbeach.
It's about mortality. And it's flying off the shelves.
An instant best seller, A Short Guide debuted Nov. 1 and sold200,000 copies in three weeks. For a while, Quindlen found herselfmeeting fans at bookstores that had sold all their copies of herbook.
A Short Guide may be small, but "in some ways, this is the AnnaQuindlen Manifesto," she says. "In 30 years, when I'm not around, mykids can read this book and hear me talking to them."
"When I'm not around"-words Quindlen is not afraid to say or evenlive her life by. Her mother died when Anna was a sophomore incollege, an event that she says split her life in two.
She writes in A Short Guide, ` "Before' and `after' for me was notjust before my mother's illness and after her death. It was thedividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and inTechnicolor. The lights came on, for the darkest possible reason."
The 48-year-old Quindlen says now, "I wish people could learn thiswithout staring death in the face. We are minuscule and insignificant-and we are totally important to ourselves. If you can do what makesyou happy, why not?"
Six years ago, Quindlen walked away from a dream job as an op-edcolumnist for the New York Times, where she had won a Pulitzer Prizeand a devoted following for her candid, impassioned takes on thelarge issues of the day, as well as on her private struggles as aworking mother of three children.
At the time, she said she wanted to devote more time to writingfiction. She stopped short of saying she wanted to "get a life," asshe exhorts readers of A Short Guide to do.
Quindlen now has three novels under her belt. The latest, Blackand Blue, published in 1998, was already a best seller when OprahWinfrey picked it for her book club. A fourth novel is in the works.
Quindlen also has returned to journalism, with a biweekly columnfor Newsweek magazine, and moved with her family from Hoboken, N.J.,into a house in Manhattan, "the house Black and Blue bought."
While she says she "will always miss newspapers," Quindlen saysshe loves "being a free agent." And of child-rearing, she says, "youcan't phone it in. You have to be there. You have to hang around thehouse. It's more important to be home (with children) between theages of 14 and 16 than between birth and age 2," because adolescenceis when the "fine-tuning of their morals and ethics" takes place.
Quindlen's children are now 17, 15 and 12. (Her husband, GeraldKorvatin, is a trial lawyer.) Her older son will go to college in thefall, a prospect she says causes her "huge" pain.
"But I say, OK, with these particular lemons, I can makelemonade." That is, less time spent with her children as they beginto move away means more time for herself and her work.
There are some things she still hasn't done-she has more novels towrite, and she'd like to travel. "I'd sort of like to join the PeaceCorps," she says. "I feel like I was so driven as a really youngwoman that I missed a lot of the stuff other postgrads I knew did."
Quindlen says, "You have to say to yourself, `What makes mehappy?' And then do it! It's astonishing to me how happiness has beendevalued. It's such a basic thing."
And, she says, people might be surprised to discover that whatwill make them happy is to make other people happy throughphilanthropy and giving of their time. "How great is that, to changesomebody's life for the better?"
Quindlen says that for her epitaph, she would be happy to shareCharlotte's, the spider in Charlotte's Web: "A good writer and a goodfriend."
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