Kickstart Your 2023. Here is the One LifeHack You Need to Supercharge Your Personal Growth in the New Year
Or maybe it's better called a DeathHack?
Lie down in your coffin.
Just as monks used to do.
Get supine and comfortable in it. (Figuratively, at any rate.)
That is, imagine that your life is over.
Done.
Finis.
You’re looking back now, over the expanse of years.
Dr. Johnson was right, wasn’t he, when he said there’s nothing like death to concentrate the mind?
So was Stephen Covey when he used to say: begin with the end in mind.
Imagining the end of your life can help you think more clearly about what you would like to make of your life right now.
Many write out their reflections in an Obituary Exercise.
That’s what Kate Montclair, that compulsive journaler and goal-setter, did whenever she needed to kickstart her efforts toward personal growth.
What follows is the last Obituary Exercise she ever wrote.
But the reader should be aware that the lesson Kate draws at the end of it is not the last lesson Kate wanted to offer the world about her life…
Kate Montclair, Who Regrettably Was Never Able to Come to Terms with Life in a Cosmos Ill-Suited to Her Aspirations, Loves, and Heartfelt Demands for Meaning, Is Cut Down by the Hand of Said Cosmos, Cruelly Below the Median Age of Death for a Person of Her Gender and Demographic Status, at 55
Midway through the journey of our life Kate Montclair passed away on a lovely Saturday morning at her family’s ancestral seat, Five Hearths, in Fauquier County, Virginia, where all the best homes are known by charmingly descriptive epithets, though many are still regularly put on sale by Sotheby’s because (a) the property taxes in the county are astronomically high and (b) the upkeep of such piles is a long slow war of attrition that can only end in defeat (unless one is at or near the top 1% of the nation’s wage-earners, which some of Kate’s neighbors quite frankly are). Kate herself, being a career high school English teacher, was nowhere near the top 1% of the nation’s wage-earners, save geographically. Five Hearths, where Kate spent her childhood, was bequeathed to her in her mother’s will. It came to her blessedly all paid for, with a trust established for property taxes and upkeep. But given that property taxes and upkeep always exceeded the fund’s payout, Kate was forced to live on at Five Hearths in increasingly genteel squalor. Sale of the property would have make Kate pretty flush, but it was never seriously in question. Kate had rekindled her childhood love for the Blue Ridge Mountains and would not be parted from them.
Katherine “Kate” Montclair was born on November 2, 1964 to Stephen Montclair and Germaine (Harris) Montclair. At Washington and Lee University she helped found the comedy troupe Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Strange that still flourishes on that campus. Upon graduation she taught for two years at Wildwood International Catholic School in Rome, Italy. After returning to the States in the summer of 1988, she spent the next several years in New York City forging a career as a comedy writer. In the fall of 1992 she returned to teaching, first at The March School, Middleburg, Virginia, and then later at St. George’s School, Houston, Texas, where she remained until she returned to the Washington D.C. area in 1997 to take up a position at Brook Farm Academy, where she taught for the remainder of her career.
But Kate always kept up her writing. She was most proud of her humorous, Austen-inspired essay on the lives of single female schoolteachers, “Poor Gentlewomen in Love,” that was published in the April 8, 1994 edition of The New Yorker.
Kate thought her New Yorker piece was her big breakthrough. Her dream of quitting teaching and writing full-time finally seemed possible. But then her second submission to the New Yorker came back like a boomerang. She submitted elsewhere, she wrote more, but the big-time publishing world had once again lowered the portcullis, which posture it retained throughout the rest of Kate’s life.
Kate, however, was a good teacher, most popular with bookish, alienated girls who admired her style in clothes, good hair, and rapier wit. In the first part of her career she directed many fall plays and spring musicals, but though she never directed theatre in the latter part of her career, Brook Farm Academy students will recall the day she began a Macbeth Unit with a Hamilton-inspired rap introduction (“Let me tell you all a saga ’bout a trusted thane/who made his pleasant seat into a house of pain….”).
Yet Ms. Montclair will be best remembered by her students for her zealous devotion to good writing. Written compositions could only be submitted with a “confession” signed by the author, a confession ending with the words
So, acknowledging that I remain an apprentice
With still much to do on my way toward mastery
I commend this work to your discernment
Humbly requesting it be deemed acceptable
Pending the appropriate alterations.
Alterations, except in two legendary instances, were always necessary. After “confessing” their writing “sins” to Ms. Montclair, students would be given the “penance” of correcting their mistakes in a fresh draft. It was quite rare for written compositions to go through less than three drafts. Indeed, the phrase “Acceptable, pending the appropriate alterations,” became a shibboleth among Kate’s students and always served as the caption to her photograph in the school yearbook. As a young woman Kate was to her best students the cool older sister. As she grew older she transformed into the wise and clever but disappointed spinster aunt. In her later years Kate often felt her junior and senior girls looking at her and thinking, “I love me my Ms. Montclair, but whatever happens to me I don’t want to end up like her.”
As for family life, there is not much to say except that Kate was Never Really Married for seven years. No, really. His name was Tim and he also was a high school English teacher at St. George’s School in Houston. Kate and Tim were not married in the Catholic Church, but after their divorce Tim returned to the faith of his youth and, eventually desiring to remarry, sought and received an annulment. The court of canon law found that Kate and Tim had never been open to children. If you’re keeping score, that’s a trespass against Canon 1101, section 2, “The willful exclusion of children.” On strictly legal grounds Kate knew it was no contest. She and Tim had actually signed a homemade prenup, one stipulation of which was that they would not have offspring. This was all Tim’s idea. Something about changing diapers and dropping the kids at soccer practice in a minivan offended his sense of dignity as an artiste (Tim had a side-hustle as a photographer). Kate only went along with it because she was sure, once they were married, she would be able to change Tim’s mind. Alas.
Kate did her best to get used to being Never Really Married. It was tough going, especially for a gal pushing forty. One advantage was that, when she did go on dates, she didn’t have to refer to herself as divorced. But for Kate, going on dates in her late 30s/40s with a string of lonely, paunchy, mostly divorced men was not exactly the fulfillment of a girl’s romantic dreams.
So, was there no man in Kate’s life after Tim? No, not really. A stupid liaison or two when she went on solitary vacations to Florida. Three dates over the course of two years with her Fauquier County neighbor’s Peter Pan son from the west coast. Beyond that, nothing. In recent years, weekends were for reading, napping, puttering, exercise, and, in the evening, carry-out with Netflix. Social life consisted mainly of joining her colleagues for Friday happy hours or Sunday brunch with Lisa, her best friend and colleague from Brook Farm Academy.
Yet on the morning that she passed away Kate’s final thoughts were of a young man, a fellow teacher, and another morning long ago in Italy. Mr. Cody lay dead in her arms, with his little girl, not understanding what had happened, with her head on her daddy’s chest. Kate held Mr. Cody closely and gazed into the last of the night sky before dawn. Stars were spilled across the dark expanse as from a child’s jar of glitter. The pale moon floated away like a lost balloon. So empty and desolate that endless, pointless space.
If God is there, Kate wondered, why does he not say something? Does he not see us lying here in our pain? Why does he not show himself? Kate saw two alternatives. It is either because he is not there, or because he has disowned us. But what sort of God would disown us in our misery? No, Kate concluded, he is not there. There is no one looking down upon us as a father looks lovingly upon his child playing, while the child plays knowing the love with which she is looked at.
What values emerge from Kate’s disappointed life? Perhaps just one: how strange it is that we do not, cannot, give up hope. We still long for fullness, even when we’ve learned it is not possible. With such longing Kate Montclair died, a longing like that of a little girl who lays her head down on her father’s chest, fully expecting him, after a snuggle, to get up as always, tickle her and begin to roughhouse, as the fullness comes rushing in.
Find out more about the good death of Kate Montclair here.