If you knew you were going to die this year…

…what would you do with that knowledge?

Late last month I shared a remarkable series of emails with a fellow named Frederick. It started when he offered to send me the money it would cost to pay for two new batteries for the Lair, “the best batteries available.”

From time to time something like that happens, often just when I’m getting really concerned about how to raise the money for some essential expense. It’s not very common, always very welcome, but not unheard of. But this conversation went on in greater detail. Frederick came into a windfall he’d been waiting on for quite some time. Almost too long, in fact, since he’s in hospice care with terminal cancer and hasn’t long to live. So he decided to give himself the pleasure of dropping some funds on causes of which he approves, funds that under other, happier circumstances it might make more sense to hang on to. I had the privilege of being the first.

I don’t know what Frederick’s financial circumstances are, none of my business, but I gather he’s not exactly one of the Koch brothers. He can’t spend twenty million bucks to get his name put on a museum wing, but he can drop a few hundred to buy a mouthy old hermit a couple of new batteries – and he did.

I mentioned at the time I’d like to write about it. He gave me permission and maybe thinks I’ve forgotten because I’ve been sitting on the story for a couple of weeks. To tell the truth, I really didn’t know what to say. Still not sure I do, so bear with me.

I had a friend who died back in 2008. He was sick for quite a while. We didn’t talk about it much, but though he died suddenly it wasn’t that big a surprise, you know? And we’d sometimes joke about what we’d do if we knew for sure we only had a week or a month to live, but were still healthy enough to do whatever we wanted. It generally involved people we thought the world would be better off without, and probably wasn’t a very helpful topic of conversation. But for years I’ve speculated about just the sort of thing – far more constructive – that Frederick did for me. The very first chapter of Walt’s Gulch has an example of the places those speculations took me back then, when I was all citified and about half crazy with paranoia:

And now the part of the plan that had always seemed like expensive lunacy becomes absolutely vital. It’s never good to have a friend die, but sometimes it’s good to have a dying friend. One with similar concerns, a clean record, and a willingness to use your money to buy himself a car he’ll never drive. I felt like such a goddamned vulture when I asked him to do that. But now I slowly, carefully drive to the obscure neighborhood curb where I left the other car. The car I move every few days, gassed up and ready. The car that already contains my number one bugout bag and my camping gear. The gray generic car that is not registered in my name, and which the cops will not be looking for in their relentless search for the copkiller, and which will now save my miserable life.

😛 Yeah, Michael Owens was not a very pleasant fellow. His idea of a BOV involved running from cops from the very beginning.

Other examples that popped up as years went by didn’t necessarily involve dead friends. In a (fictional, of course) world where a failure to toe some government line could send you underground or to prison there would still always be right-minded people who had to watch their P’s and Q’s, not out of cowardice or a lack of commitment but just because family is more sacred than making some political point and you can’t care for yours if you’re locked up or dodging the law. So there would be freedomistas who were underground, and equally committed ones who were not. It’s a rather limiting lifestyle, being underground, and I can think of all sorts of services that could be provided by those who still had valid ID. I can imagine whole new sorts of commerce that could arise from that sort of thing. In fact I can imagine it very clearly.

But that’s all theoretical of course. Of course it is.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve wondered what constructive thing could I do to move freedom along if I knew this was my last year. But that’s too limiting: It sure wouldn’t amount to much in the way of philanthropy. The Lair and its contents will revert to the person who lent me the land it’s on. I’ve got some books, some ragged clothes that’ll probably go back to the thrift store most of it came from, two nice rifles and a few beaters, some chickens and two spoiled dogs and not much else to show. Basically, I’d better do what I can while I’m alive because I’ll vanish without trace when I’m dead.

And that’s where my thinking keeps hitting a wall. Not only do I have no right to make high-minded suggestions for how other people could pay freedom forward, given the poor example I’m likely to set, I can’t even think of what I’d suggest if I had the nerve. But I can salute Frederick for doing what he’s out there doing. And I can tell you from personal experience that the many small kindnesses – and a few big kindnesses – this crotchety old hermit has received from neighbors and readers have made a huge difference, whether those doing those kindnesses knew it or not.

And I suspect there are other people out there, people struggling with the difficulties some boneheaded attack of principle got them into, who could put small kindnesses to larger use. I don’t know who they are. But maybe you do. And it really isn’t necessary to wait till you die.