2026, The Year I Die

• Lori Palminteri
• Uncategorized
• February 9, 2014

“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.” – Mark Twain

I’ve been living the past eight years under the belief that I die in 2026, just before my 37th birthday.  If you think this is ridiculous, it’s because it is. But that doesn’t mean it’s stupid.  Allow me to explain.

We’ve all heard the saying, “live each day as it were your last” and that is probably the dumbest fucking saying I’ve ever heard.  You should absolutely not live each day as if it were your last. If I were to do that, every morning, I’d wake up, spend time with my family, go surfing, do stand-up one last time, then I’d spend the night doing hard drugs, partying with my friends and having gratuitous sex (it does sound like a great day though).  Which is exactly why we can’t live each day as if it were our last.  We wouldn’t get shit done.  We would never go into work, we’d be drug addicts with STD’s, capitalism would collapse, and the world would be chaos.

So, why 2026? Actually, it’s a bit more specific than that. April 17th, 2026 at 3:10pm.  The following is sort of weird, but 100% true.  In the year 2006, I was a junior in high school.  On one frigid Saturday morning in February, my cell phone rang.  It was almost 8am, and I was probably hung over, and wondering who was calling me so early on a day I get to sleep in.  I checked my phone, and I saw the missed call was from my best friend, Lauren.  This was odd.  Lauren was not an early riser.  I’ve slept over her house many times, and she was impossible to wake.  I would blast music and dance on her bed, throw stuff at her, and she literally wouldn’t budge.  So, I figured if she was calling me this early on a weekend, it was an emergency.

I called her back, she didn’t pick up.  I called her again.  She didn’t pick up.  I thought then to check the time of the call.  Maybe she called me last night, and it just went through now?  What happened next literally blew my fucking mind.  The date from the call was April 17th, 2026.  I know. What. The. Fuck.

I have long been obsessed with time travel.  And I was so pissed at myself for missing this call.  It would be one thing, if the date and time were the same, but it said 2026, instead of the year it was 2006.  But the time, month and day were all different. Holy shit! This is so cool!

As I was processing this, Lauren calls. I pick up:
“Lauren, is it you?”
“Yes?”
“Are you from the future?”
“Um… what?”

Lauren was groggy.  She was confused, and I was excited.  She had not tried to call me.  I told her about the call and the date, and she too thought this was crazy.  I later showed it to her. Hell, I showed everyone.  It always remained as the most recent call, because it was from twenty years in the future.

I’m a born day dreamer, so my mind ran rapidly with stories of what that phone call meant.  Was Lauren from the future trying to reach me?  Or was I trying to reach me?  What would I have said to my future self, or best friend?  What if they were trying to warn me?  What if they were trying to warn me about my death?  Or worse, Lauren’s death (Lauren is a far greater person than me, she’s much more valuable to the world).

I was seventeen.  Sort of weird time.  You’re finding yourself and all that bull crap.  You start asking yourself the real questions.  Who I am?  Where am I going?  What type of person do I want to be?  My phone call from the future was my obsession.  It was somehow the key to everything.  What does it mean?  That was the question I wanted the answer to.  What the fuck does it mean?

Some months passed, and I still showed off my phone call from the future to people I’d meet.  I was starting to believe that the meaning of life was simply to reproduce and survive.  Something our species has surpassed.  Since we’ve come so far, what is the meaning of life?  And I think it’s whatever you want it to be.  For some, it’s about their children, money, passion, or surviving in the woods.  Whatever brings you peace and joy, that’s the meaning of your life, and your life in the grand scheme of things is pretty insignificant.  So just have fun.

So then, what is the meaning of my life?  I couldn’t answer that question then.  But I had chosen on a meaning for my phone call from the future.  That is the day I die.  April 17th, 2026 at 3:10pm.  I will tell my best friend to call me, on that date and time, but I will never receive it.  It will somehow go back in time to a confused teen Lori.  So, I’ve made the decision to accept this bizarre fate based on no facts whatsoever, but at 17, I accepted I now had twenty years left of life.  Twenty years. Make it count.

My motto became a variation of “live each day as if it were your last,” but instead it’s “live each day as if April 17th, 2026 is your last.”  Now, that’s only twelve years away.  And I continue to go on believing this might be doomsday for me.  It’s a little morbid and absolutely absurd, I admit.  But it’s helped me, in the sense where I’ve been brave where I might have not been, thinking I have an unlimited amount of time here.  Times when I’ve been scared, like when I thought I was going to drown getting held under water in the surf, “this is not when you die.”  That’s what I told myself.  I take more risks.  When doing stand-up terrified me, I thought, “what will be your mark when you die at 36?  Will you regret not doing this?”  You appreciate more things, knowing that life is finite.

And that’s the message here, I would like to share with you. You will die. And that doesn’t necessarily have to be a sad thing.  I worked in a nursing home for four years, and, in general, there were two types of residents: The happy ones, that lived the lives that wanted to live, and the miserable pricks who did not.  Don’t be a miserable prick in a nursing home.  When things are going bad, remember you are going to die, and that thing won’t be so bad.  When things are going good, remember you are going to die, and you’ll be so grateful.