Latest / Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden / What Would You Regret? Using Your Mortality as a Compass in Midlife

Transcript

What Would You Regret? Using Your Mortality as a Compass in Midlife · Butterfly Days w Tami Jorden

• 0:10
  Tami Jorden, Butterfly Days (00:02.274)
• 0:16
  Hi Manny. this may be a little bit rickety and so you may have to carefully edit it. Also, this is a solo and it's not gonna look great. It's not made for someone to be watching it. If you turn it into something visual for YouTube, I get it, but technically I'm not making a solo for someone to watch, so you'll have to see if you think it's too horrible to watch. So now we're gonna begin. We can begin the taping now.
• 0:22
  Welcome to my realm. This is Tammy Jordan, and you're listening to Butterfly Days. You know, you're not alone. So many of us over 45 are quietly struggling. We're overwhelmed, lost, or just fading. And sometimes the weight of knowing that you're past the halfway point doesn't really feel like a milestone. It feels like a warning, you know? So let me ask you something.
• 0:34
  What would you do if you knew exactly how much time you have left?
• 0:46
  Tami Jorden, Butterfly Days (01:11.106)
• 0:52
  What would matter? What would you finally say? What would you stop tolerating and what would you stop postponing? Did your heart just skip a beat? Good. I want you to stay with that. I want you to take a moment and imagine yourself in a bed, but not if you're driving. Imagine yourself in a bed, breathing slowly. Room is quiet. You know what's coming.
• 0:58
  I know that sounds dark. But that little moment of honesty with yourself about if you are at the end of your life, it might be the most clarifying thing that you do today. Because here's what a decade of sitting beside, sitting bedside with the dying has taught me. That facing your mortality doesn't shrink your life, it actually expands it.
• 1:10
  Listen, this isn't a new idea. The Stoics had a name for it, Memento Mori. That's Latin for remember you will die. Not as a threat, but as a tool, a catalyst, a compass. Marcus Aurelius practiced it. Medieval monks lived by it, and artists painted it literally. You know, the pictures with the skull on the desk and the candle burning low? It's all memento mori. And the message wasn't despair, it was this.
• 1:22
  A finite life consciously lived is more fully inhabited than one where death is ignored. And we've lost that today. Modern Western culture has reframed.
• 1:34
  Tami Jorden, Butterfly Days (02:56.043)
• 1:40
  I'm gonna start that sentence again, Manny. Modern Western culture has reframed aging as failure, medical, moral, aesthetic failure. We flee death. We medicate it, filter it, defer it. But death is not a failure. I say it over and over, it's really important. Death is not a failure. It's just simply the end of a life cycle. And it's as natural as any season turning. And when you hold that truth.
• 1:46
  Really hold it. The trivial falls away. And what matters rises. So here's what I see happen when people finally reckon with their mortality. The noise clears. The opinions of others, family, society, religion, politics, all that noise that's been shaping your choices.
• 1:58
  Because when you realize you may have 20 years left, the axis shifts. You're probably not gonna win Wimbledon. You're not heading headlining at the severe, at the severe. I always call it that goofy name. You're not headlining at the sphere. Some windows have closed, and we can make peace with that. But here's what's not closed. The chance to feel something real, to do work that matters to you.
• 2:10
  To learn, train, travel, connect, create, to stop living someone else's idea of your life and start inhabiting your own. The question isn't, is it too late? The question is, what would I regret not doing for me if I were breathing my last breath tomorrow? Not for your kids, not for your spouse and your parents or what your church or political party thinks.
• 2:22
  For you, just you, and that's the pivot. And that's where butterfly days lives in this question. Now let me tell you how I got here. I was a mom, a PTCO president. I was running kids to activities, chasing homework, doing all the things. When my youngest hit middle school, I started looking for volunteer work, and I found Ronald McDonald House, and I loved it.
• 2:34
  Tami Jorden, Butterfly Days (05:18.347)
• 2:40
  I love supporting families with kids in crisis. And I also found children's hospital and I got to volunteer in the NICU. But something kept pulling me further. Then one afternoon, on a five hour road trip with we'll call her Susan, my very dear friend, her niece's wedding came up. Not n they didn't have an officiant. I, being the loving, obnoxious friend that I am, suggested Susan could get ordained online.
• 2:46
  We start Googling it in the car. Took about four minutes to figure out it was possible. She was thinking about marrying her niece, and of note, she's married two nieces now for the record with that ordination. And I didn't collect a fee on that because I am magnanimous. And I was sitting there thinking, and this is the embarrassing part. If I got ordained, I'd want to work with people who are dying. Yes, I am that weirdo.
• 2:58
  I've been thinking about end of life since I took on death and dying in high school. So I got ordained, and that led me to a program at a local hospital called No One Dies Alone. Volunteers sitting vigil with patients who had 72 hours or less, no family, no one to hold space. But I did that work in stolen hours around my mom life, weird hours, very sacred hours. And I found out something about myself. I love
• 3:10
  sitting vigil. I love holding that space. There is something that happens in those final hours that is without question the most profound thing I've ever witnessed and the most mundane at the same time. It's that sacred mix that gets me, you know, kind of like watching a birth does. It's sacred and yet it's so very human and raw and real.
• 3:22
  That work led me to volunteer with my local nonprofit hospice, and that's where I am today. It's become a mission because death is the last taboo on our culture, and I find that genuinely absurd. The one thing every single one of us will do, and we can barely say the word. Here's what I want you to know. Hospice is not giving up. It's often the most compassionate, most dignified choice available.
• 3:34
  Tami Jorden, Butterfly Days (07:42.741)
• 3:40
  It's covered by Medicare, the VA, and most insurances. It provides wraparound care at the most vulnerable moment a family will ever face. And right now in America, even many doctors don't fully understand what hospice offers or when to reach for it. A good death is possible and it deserves to be protected. That's what I stand for. So here's your challenge, and it's simple.
• 3:46
  This is what I'm gonna challenge you. Sit with the question, the one that made your heart skip. What would I regret if I were at the end of my time? Not as an exercise in guilt, as an act of love for yourself, toward the life you still have. Let that question be your compass. Start with one thing one conversation that you've been avoiding, one dream that you've been deterring.
• 3:58
  One truth that you've been swallowing. You don't have to blow up your whole life. You just have to stop pretending the clock isn't ticking. Because it is for all of us. And that's not the tragedy. That's the invitation, sisters.
• 4:10
  So here's my benediction for you. May you have the courage to see clarity as an act of love for yourself. May you love yourself enough to let the world have the best of you. May you lay down the weight of others' expectations long enough to honor your own heart now. May you know the unexpected grace of living true. Saint Francis said this years ago.
• 4:22
  It is in dying that we live. You arrived in this world on a breath, and one day you'll go home on it too. And on that final exhale, may you know you left it all on the floor. And remember, I'm rootin' for you, so get it, girl. Please, will you share this episode with others to help move the needle on making middle age and end of life?
• 4:34
  Tami Jorden, Butterfly Days (09:59.23)
• 4:40
  Transitions that are not so fraught for millennials, Gen Z, and even the little Gen Alphas, they deserve a world that we can help create now when we're thoughtful. If you want to learn about hospice care for yourself or for someone else, I've linked some resources in the show notes on Substack, Apple, and YouTube. And as always, my inbox is open. I'd love to hear from you.