The Premonition

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. What if you knew when you were going to die? How would it change the way you lived your life?

I do feel like this is the year I need to be very careful.

The way you relate to others, to your work?

It's something that I just had held so close to my heart or to myself, and so I hesitated. I wondered if I should share it.

Would you feel unshackled from community norms, cut off other cars in traffic, and show up drunk to work? Would you take that trip you've always wanted and try to squeeze every last pleasure from life? Or would you try to do all the good that was possible in the moments you had left?

You know, if I don't make it through this year, there's some things I want to get finished up.

This week on Hidden Brain, a premonition that haunted one man for decades and what the knowledge of death can tell us about a life well-lived. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Liberty Mutual Insurance. Making smart decisions includes considering how to protect your car and home and how much you're paying to insure them. Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance to save you money. Because when you've worked hard for something, choosing insurance should be easy. Start your quote at libertymutual.com. Support for Hidden Brain comes from LinkedIn. Hiring for a small business is hard. LinkedIn Hiring Pro acts like a helpful hiring partner. Chat with it about what matters most, compare candidates side by side, and share feedback like, I want someone with more hands-on experience. HiringPro adjusts and surfaces candidates who fit your needs. Get started by posting your job for free at linkedin.com/hb. Terms and conditions apply.

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One night when Paul Burnham was 15 years old, he had a dream.

In the dream, I was traveling Kind of on a flat area or in a deep canyon, and I was in the very bottom of it. And on either side of me were just these enormous cliffs, and the walls were just 1,000 feet, just these huge, these enormous walls. I felt like someone was with me there, maybe behind me. And as we traveled along, we came to a bend in that canyon, and as we saw that bend, there was a big, large cut in the cliffs or in the canyon walls.

Even in the dream, Paul remembers it was dramatic. The tall cliffs of the canyon suddenly fell away.

And I We looked and saw this big cut coming down through the cliffs, kind of a ramp coming down through the cliffs. As we saw that, I turned around and I looked at the person that was with me, and he leaned back, and I woke up.

When Paul woke up, it was a hot summer night, so he got up and opened the window to let in the breeze. And went back to bed.

When I went back to sleep, I had a second dream.

In the second dream, Paul was playing a game called a paper fortune teller. Sometimes it's called a cootie catcher. A piece of paper is folded up into squares, and you're presented with several choices with a unique color or number. Once you choose an option, a flap is opened to reveal your fortune.

I opened it up and I looked at everything inside, and on the inside were just a series of numbers. And I thought, okay, this is a game that a person plays, and the answer is how long you're going to live, how many years you're going to live.

The game presented Paul with 8 choices. He picked one. It opened up to the number 54. He made a second choice. Again, 54. The third, the fourth, the fifth— 54, 54, 54.

And what I found is no matter what I chose, no matter how I started, No matter how I changed my choices or changed how I started the game, I always landed on the same number, and that was 54. And in my dream, I felt like this is telling me that I'm going to live until I'm 54 years old.

When Paul woke up, he thought the 2 dreams were strange. But with dreams, the strange is normal. So he put them out of his mind. 2 years later, he went off to college at Brigham Young University in Utah. One summer between semesters, he took a job as a wilderness ranger in Southeast Alaska.

And the person I was working with, his name is James. We would spend 10 days at a time out in the wilderness.

The landscape was vast and wild. Endless forests of pine trees, crystal clear waters, dramatic rugged cliffs.

Everything that we saw— wildlife, people, old mining camps— anything that we found, we were to document that. And so we worked both on land, just crossing open ground, And then we also worked on the coast and we had a boat. And one day we went up one of the— what they call an arm or a fjord. And the weather was pretty calm. The sea was pretty flat. And both sides of this arm were bounded or bordered by just sheer cliffs coming right down to the water. And as we were traveling up, we were talking about going all the way to the end of this arm where we would see a glacier. But we also wondered, would there be a place to get out? Would there be a place to pull the boat out, to stop, to get out, to hike around? And as we were going up this arm, there was a bend ahead of us, and I started to Have that feeling of déjà vu a little bit. I started to feel like I, I recognized this place, like I had been there, though I had never actually been to this place. And so I told James, I said, James, cut the engine. And I wanted to just kind of reflect and think about this because the feeling that I was having was fairly strong that I had seen this place before, but I didn't know when or where. And he cut the engine and we just stopped and we were floating. And I started to remember that dream that I had had.

The first dream he'd had that night when he was 15.

I started to recognize the elements of that dream and the cliffs coming down to the bottom of this canyon. And I remembered in the dream I went around a corner and there was a big break in the cliffs, a big opening. And so I turned around and I said to James, we're going to go around this corner and there will be a break in these cliffs. And he kind of looked at me funny. That's all I said to him is that Here's what we're gonna see. I think I described it a little bit, that it would be a break, it would come right down to the water, we would be able to get right up to it. And so we motored, we started the engine again and we motored along for a few minutes and we came around that bend in the long arm and there was a break in the cliffs. And I remember in the dream, the person I was with leaned back. And when we were in the boat, James leaned back and he kind of looked up at the top of the cliffs and looked up at the sky, and he just laughed and laughed. And I started laughing because it was so funny that I had described exactly what we were seeing. I had described it fairly well. He asked me how I knew it, and I just told him, I've had a dream of this place. I have— I've seen this place before.

They pulled the boat out onto a rocky beach where the cliffs came down. They went for a hike. They had lunch. At first, Paul thought it was cool that he'd had a dream that foretold what the 2 friends had just seen. But then he started to worry. He remembered he'd had 2 dreams that night.

This is telling me that I'm going to live until I'm 54 years old. For the rest of that afternoon and that evening, I just thought about those 2 dreams and wondered what it meant. One dream had come true, and would the other dream come true?

Now, I should stop here and tell you something about Paul. Like me, he prizes rationality. Dreams, we rationalists know, are not premonitions. They're just, well, dreams. But Paul asked himself what the odds were that a dream would so perfectly describe the cliffs he and James had just seen. Paul felt like he had been told something, shown something.

I think I just started to feel maybe the gravity or the— that maybe there's more meaning to this, that it's not just a coincidence.

If the first dream was a premonition, could the second be a premonition too? Was it possible that he really had received a vision about when he was going to die? There was one silver lining. Paul was only 22. 54? That was an eternity away. When we come back, eternity flies by. How old are you now, Paul?

I'm 52. I'll be 53 next week.

You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. More than 400 years ago, William Shakespeare wrote a tragic play about one man's meteoric rise and epic fall. He called it Macbeth. The tale that Shakespeare tells in Macbeth begins with a series of prophecies. 3 witches share a vision with Macbeth. He's going to be promoted to a new title in the Scottish aristocracy.

Macbeth, hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor.

When that prophecy comes true, Macbeth starts to believe a second prediction made by the witches. They foresee that he will become king.

All hail Macbeth that shall be king hereafter.

Soon, Macbeth starts to take steps to make the prophecy come true. He kills the king and usurps the throne. But in the end, Macbeth is killed. The omen ends in tragedy. Paul Burnham had 2 strange dreams when he was 15. When one came true, he started to ask, if the second dream might also come true. Would he really die at 54? For a long time, the question felt abstract. He told himself that 54 was a long ways away. Then Paul found himself turning 53. That's when I first spoke with him.

So I am Paul Burnham. I listen to Hidden Brain quite often, and I was listening to the podcast and I was driving on the freeway and I heard the invitation to send in secrets or things that we felt were secrets and, you know, what we had gained, what we had lost by keeping that secret. And then when I got home later in the day, I nearly didn't do it. I thought about maybe just not worrying about it, but I kept thinking about it and decided to record that and send that in.

And when you had some hesitation about it, Paul, what was that hesitation about?

The hesitation mostly was that I had never shared this story with anyone, and it's something that I just had held so close to my heart or to myself. And so I hesitated. I wondered if I should share it.

As Paul approached 54, The unformed anxiety in his heart that began at age 22 started to take concrete shape. The more he thought about the second dream, the more he realized it was ambiguous.

I'm 52. I'll be 53 next week. And when you're 53, you're in your 54th year. So I'm not sure if I have a year or if I have not a year. I don't know.

When Paul is nervous, he laughs. It's a tick I noticed as I got to know him. As we talked, he corrected his comment that he'd never shared the story of the 2 dreams with anyone. He told me he had told 2 people about the second dream. One time, some years ago, he got in a conversation with a couple of colleagues.

The young man that I was talking to, he said something like, well, we just never know when our time will come. And I said, well, I think I do. I think I do know when my time will come. And he kind of looked at me funny and he said, what do you mean? No one can know that. And I said, oh, you know, one time I had a dream. And I shared the dream with him.

him.

And afterwards I regretted that a little bit because I felt like maybe I had shared some burden with them, that what I was carrying, I needed to carry.

That burden was heavy, and he didn't want anyone else to be weighed down by it. After he'd seen the first dream come true in Alaska, Paul had graduated college. He'd gotten married. He had 2 kids. But he never breathed a word about the 2 dreams to his family. Prophecy or not, he felt this was his cross to carry. After that first interview, Paul checked in with me every few months. He would also occasionally send me voice recordings of his thoughts.

Hi, Shankar. It's Saturday, a couple days ahead of my birthday, and I've been fishing with my son in a kind of a remote corner of Yellowstone National Park. We hiked in this morning and we've just been fishing all day. And really, it's been a wonderful day. It's sunny and cool, and we put up our hammocks and had lunch and took a 2-hour nap, and we're gonna start fishing again. How do I feel today? Well, I feel indestructible or invincible. We'll see how I feel on Monday, on my birthday. Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear Bob, happy birthday to you. Here's how you put candles out, blow candles out during COVID You switch your hand at it. Hi, Shankar. It's September 9th. I'm 2 days into my 54th year. I thought about being 53 and being in my 54th year. I don't think my 15-year-old intellect understood that turning 53 is the same as being in my 54th year. I think my dream was clearly about being 54, turning 54. So I'm gonna relax this year. I've got a year to go.

After I received that recording, I assumed that Paul had put his worries to rest for at least the next year. But then a couple of months later, he sent me another voice memo that suggested his fears were still with him.

I had a close call the other evening while on a walk and crossing the street at a not well-lit intersection. A minivan made a sudden left turn right where I was crossing, and I went into what I'd call a dream state, that place where our brains process minutes or hours of thoughts and memories in only a moment. As the minivan was careening toward me, I saw the driver's face illuminated by her cell phone. She hadn't seen me, and she wasn't planning on stopping. In that moment, my thoughts turned to the 2 dreams. And I replayed them both in my head as though I were checking to see if a car accident was in one of them, if I had seen what was about to happen. Fortunately, at the last second, the driver looked up and slammed on her brakes, and I walked on, and she drove away. That was the end of it. But as I walked home, I wasn't really rattled or fazed by the near accident itself, but what occupied my thoughts was how much I was able to remember and recall and process in that brief moment before the driver stopped. Ideas that I had reflected on for years, that I had written down on scraps of paper and reread and pondered. All these hours of thought, all of this was compressed into one moment. And I realized that every time for the last 30 years, whenever I remembered these 2 dreams, I realized I was spending a lot of time rehashing and reanalyzing and resorting the events and worrying and wondering if the second dream would come true.

As Paul walked home, he couldn't stop thinking about his near brush with death. He couldn't elude the feeling that he had been shown something, that a clock was ticking down the hours. The minivan seemed like more than just a harbinger of death. It seemed like a symbol for the burden he had carried for more than 30 years.

So before I got home, I decided to take all of these thoughts And the emotion and energy that accompanied the memory of these two dreams, and to name them. So I called it the minivan. And what I was doing was putting all of this in a box. I was putting a complex and sometimes confusing problem in a single place where I could contain and manage it. Now, when something reminds me of the dreams. And all of the thoughts and emotions start coming to the surface, instead of trying to sort everything out again, I just remember that I've sorted this out before. I've organized it already. I don't have to do it again. I just think, oh, here comes the minivan.

Except it wasn't so easy. for Paul to keep the minivan under control. The more we talked, the more it became clear that the 2 dreams were continuing to bother him.

I think about it just about every day. I think it's mostly random. There are, there are moments when, when it does pop up, usually when I'm crossing the street or in heavy traffic or something like that. I don't dwell on it or think about it for a long time. But it does pop into my mind probably every day for a minute or two.

Paul had still not shared his concerns with his wife Kim. He kept debating whether he should. The rationalist in him kept arguing the case that dreams were just dreams.

I've often thought, you know, it's just a dream. I've had thousands of dreams. None of them have come true except the one, and it coincides with this other one.

At times when he'd make the case to me that he was putting the fear out of his head, I wondered how much he was talking to me and how much he was talking to himself.

I think I'm very hopeful that it's just a dream. I've become really hopeful that the dream has simply caused me to maybe become more focused or become more aware. But that it's not something that's going to actually happen.

But then he'd think, okay, but what if? What if this wasn't just a dream? As I talked with Paul, I felt myself wavering about the meaning of the dream. Of course it was just a dream, I'd tell myself. And then a voice inside me would ask, But what if it was more than that? If Paul did die in his 54th year, would I have to have a conversation with his wife and kids? Would I have to explain to them that Paul had told me his fears, recorded his fears, and I had just sat on the information and scoffed that it was just a dream?

I think it's something that still is challenging for me to understand and to see that Maybe there is a limit to rationality, and I've pushed beyond that and seen something that I can't describe. I can't explain.

Yeah, I mean, the striking thing again, I think a lot of people have dreams and premonitions, but I think that the striking thing in your case, in your story, is that you had these 2 dreams on the same night, and then one of them came true in such a dramatic and vivid manner. I think that's what— if I had had the same experience, I think my own confidence in my rationality would also have been shaken.

Yeah.

Because it really feels like you've been shown that one of the dreams can come true.

Yeah, shaken. That's probably a good way to describe how I felt then and sometimes how I feel when I open up the minivan and pull everything out and look at it again. Yeah.

As we talked every few months, his 54th birthday approached. Paul asked himself at one point whether the dream might be telling him something Rather than showing him something, was it less a prophecy and more a warning?

So I've put a countdown timer on my phone.

Have you really?

I have. It's just an app. You've probably seen it. You can just put in there a specific date and it counts down to it. And so I've put a countdown timer in, and the name of the timer is "Be Careful Now." You know, right now I'm fine. I'm indestructible. I'm invincible. But when I do look at it, I think, okay, I'll need to be careful. Maybe there are things I wouldn't do. Maybe I wouldn't go mountain climbing or something like that. I'll just be more careful this year.

I see. And have you actually taken any steps, concrete steps, to basically Plan ahead for if your life were to end after you turn 54 or when you turn 54?

You know, probably the most concrete step I took is I just renewed a life insurance policy. And I have to laugh. I have to laugh about that because I am very rational in my thought and my approach to things. So much so that, you know, when this first dream came true, it gave me pause. It really caused me to stand back and say, wow, this has really happened. This is very clearly something that I've, that I've seen before. Can this other, can this other thing happen as well? So, yeah, taking out a life insurance policy, I don't know that it becomes more concrete than that.

It's interesting when you fill out a life insurance policy, I'm assuming there's no clause there which says, Have you had premonitions of your own death?

As I renewed this one, I looked for it and there's nothing in there like that.

So you have a clean conscience as you've applied for the policy?

Yeah, there's no fraud. There's no fraud involved.

As I listened back to that exchange some weeks later, I found myself asking, was my laughter nervous laughter too? When we come back, Paul turns 54. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. For decades, Paul Burnham lived with the weight of 2 dreams he'd had when he was 15, dreams that suggested he might die at the age of 54. The first dream came true, so Paul thought the second, the dream that predicted he would die, might also come to pass. As Paul was in his 54th year, He wondered if he should tell his family about the 2 dreams.

I've gone back and forth. Do I, do I share this? Do I not share this? And more and more I'm coming to a place where maybe I need to, because as much as I think that it would place a heavy burden on those closest to me, maybe it would also be an opportunity to just have a gigantic belly laugh and we all laugh it off and it's a crazy dream and we go on, or it becomes a concern and, you know, my wife worries and is concerned and it affects her. That's what I keep going back and forth on.

It was a dilemma. He wasn't sure if his wife would want to know, but the only way to find out if she wanted to know was to ask her. Of course, that would take away her choice in the matter. It seemed to me that Paul was waiting for a sign. And then he received one.

Hi, Shankar. It's Paul, and I'm halfway down Dang Canyon, as in dang, this is a hard canyon. There's a lot of rockfall and pools of water to get through. A couple of pools. They have ice in them. See if the rock will break through.

Nope.

Anyway, I've just stopped for lunch and I'm going to eat and rest here for a little while. A few months ago when you and I spoke on the phone, part of our conversation was, Should I let my family know that I've had these two dreams and share my concern with them? And I've wondered about that off and on since then. And how would I ever know until a week or two ago, and we were watching an episode of Lost. I think it.

The TV show Lost features a group of plane crash survivors on a remote island. One of them, Charlie, receives a prophecy: he is going to die. Later, he goes on a dangerous mission, knowing there's a good chance he will drown. Before he leaves, he says goodbye to his girlfriend Claire. He doesn't mention his potential death.

While I'm gone, Don't worry about me.

Paul was watching the show with his wife Kim and his daughter Mary.

I paused the show and I said, what do you think? Do you think Charlie should tell her? Because obviously he's not going to, but do you think he should? And Kim and Mary both responded with a resounding, yes.

No way.

And I said, why not? And they both agreed that it would be really hard for her. It would cause her a lot of pain knowing that he knew that he was going to die. So I got my answer, I think, a resounding no way. They would not want to know. All right. I am going to keep hiking down this canyon, and I'll catch up to you later.

Sometime after, I got Paul on the line. It was his birthday. He was now 54. Hey, Paul.

Hi, Shankar.

Hey, happy birthday.

Thanks so much.

How do you feel today?

Really good. Really alive. Yeah, I feel great. A lot of thoughts and a lot of emotion this morning. I've made it. I've made it this far.

I'm wondering if you can tell me what your first thought was when you woke up in the morning.

Well, I just thought about how many years it's been since I had this dream of turning 54 or not making it past 54. I guess you could say I opened the minivan. I brought out all these thoughts and emotions, and I do feel like this is the year I need to be very careful. Not overly cautious, not— I don't want to do things that would create a problem, but rather just take a little more care in what I do.

Mm-hmm.

And thinking that, well, if this does happen, if I don't make it through this year, there's some things I want to get finished up. and resolved and not leaving loose ends, as it were.

Can you give me some examples of things that you have done already that speak to that, the idea of not leaving loose ends?

On my birthday, sometimes I like to get a gift to give to the kids or to my family on my birthday. And I said to my son, I said, do you remember A conversation that we had about 10 years ago. I was talking about when I would give you this watch. And he said, yeah, I remember that conversation. I said, do you remember that I told you I'd give you this watch when I turned 54? Well, I'm 54 now. I took my watch off and I gave it to my son. He doesn't know the significance of 54 and still doesn't even after this weekend after I gave it to him.

In Paul's mind, the gift to his son might not have made sense in the moment, but it would make sense once he died. It reflected a change in the way Paul was thinking. He had spent the better part of 30 years worrying about his own mortality. Now, he found himself turning his attention outward asking what he could do for others before he died.

I'm not convinced that it's true, that it's going to happen or anything like that. But at the same time, I think the— maybe the action that I take isn't so much to keep myself safe, but rather just to live with a lot of intention this year and to really pay attention to how I'm interacting with other people, If I have any feeling that this is foreordained, then what I'm going to do is live my best life, I guess.

Hmm.

Yeah.

Hmm. I mean, and in some ways you could argue this is what everyone should be doing, right? You might not know you're going to die at age 54, but you know you're going to die at some point. And, you know, given the vastness of time and space, you're going to die sometime in the near future. Near future being, you know, maybe several decades away. in the vastness of time and space, that is still the near future. And given that, it makes eminently good sense to actually live your life the way you think you should be living your life and to be deliberate about it.

I think so. I think this just makes it more clear, more plain that if I look at this and tell myself, hey, okay, I've got 1 year or I've got 6 months, then I'm going to focus all of that energy doing those things that I that I really want to do to make my life, my family's life, my neighbors' and community a better place. I think this has just brought that into focus, maybe.

That became clear at the end of the interview as we were chit-chatting about what Paul was going to do the rest of the day. He told me he was going to celebrate his 54th birthday by donating blood.

When I was 25 or 30, somewhere in there, I did make a goal to donate 100 units of blood, and I hit that goal in May of this year.

Wow.

I thought it was interesting that I had set that goal and then to donate 100 units of blood over my lifetime, and here I was in my 54th year and I had reached that goal. I thought, well, there it is. I reached my goal. I'm done. But I've started to think about that again and feel like maybe I'll set that goal again and see if I can reach another 100 units of blood. And my first appointment is this evening at 6:30. I'm going to give blood again.

How you doing?

Doing all right.

Good.

My name is Nikki.

I'm gonna get you going here.

All right.

Paul Burnham?

Yes.

12 gallons.

Woo!

I made a goal to do 100 units years ago, and I hit it.

Yeah.

And I thought I'm done. That's awesome. And then you're like, I gotta keep going. I gotta come back.

Yeah.

Yeah.

A few months passed and I didn't hear from Paul. Then one day he sent me an email saying that he had brought up the episode of Lost again with his family. And to his surprise, they had changed their minds. Now they said they would want to know if a family member was going to die. I was surprised. Shortly after I got that email, I asked Paul how he would feel telling Kim with me present in the room. He thought it over and decided he would do it. Kim agreed to meet. He didn't tell her what the dreams were about, though. I went to Salt Lake City and invited Paul and Kim over to my hotel for a chat over breakfast.

Paul, how are you? Really good. Thank you.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you.

Good morning.

Good morning. Please come in.

Thank you.

I'm going to have you sit on this side if that's okay.

Okay.

Paul was friendly and genial. Kim seemed a little hesitant. Why was her husband telling her about some dreams with a journalist and microphones present? We sat down and I passed around some yogurt and muffins.

I'm Paul Burnham and I live in Pleasant Grove, Utah.

I'm Kim Burnham and happy to be here.

I started by asking Kim how she and Paul first met. She told their origin story with the ease of someone who's recounted it dozens of times, but still found it entertaining.

My cousin kept telling me, oh, I've got this guy I need to introduce you to. And then he'd run into Paul and say, oh, I've got this girl I need to introduce you to. And so that went back and forth for a while. Paul and I had already met. We met at a little apartment party, started dating, and my cousin said, hey, Paul, you know, I've got to— I've got to introduce you to my cousin. And Paul said, well, I'm kind of dating this girl and, like, it's getting kind of serious. And turns out it was me. So it was kind of an interesting way to meet. Our first date was—

They got married in 1992. Paul became a civil engineer, Kim an elementary school teacher. I asked Kim to tell me more about the man I'd been talking to for a year and a half.

I think one of my favorite things about Paul is his generosity. He's, he's a very kind and generous person and helps me to want to be better. He's quiet and thinks and kind of watches and reads people, and I'm a little more impulsive.

I asked Paul to tell Kim about the 2 dreams. He told her about the first one, seeing the canyons, the bend in the river, the break in the cliffs.

As I was traveling along the bottom of this canyon, I couldn't really tell if the bottom of the canyon was a river or if it was a road or exactly what it was.

And he told her about his experience in Alaska, When the dream came true.

I started to feel like I've seen this place before. These tall cliffs, the flat floor of the canyon. And there was a bend coming up that we couldn't see around. And so we throttled back the engine and—

I'm wondering, Kim, if I can ask you, what do you make of this dream? And do you have any thoughts about it?

How are you hearing Well, most of the time I don't remember my dreams, and Paul seems to be able to remember his dreams in the morning. I don't know that there really are so many coincidences. It feels like a lot of things happen that we attribute to being a coincidence, and, and maybe it's not. It just makes me really interested to know what the next dream is, so.

I think it's I might be a little emotional here. This is the dream that I've just kind of held on to for, for all these years. So I went back to sleep, and the second dream was that I had one of these little paper games. When I opened this paper up, I would see how long I would live. I played the game. And I opened it, and the number was 55.

Paul told her about the second dream. He told her how long he had held on to the secret. I glanced over at Kim and saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

If anyone knows Paul, you know that he Really spends his life trying to make everyone else's life better. And we've built our life together, and it worries me that he's had one dream come true, and I don't want this one to.

Nor do I.

You know, it just worries me. I don't like it. I don't want to do life without him. We do life well together. And we have a family together. And we both contribute very different things to our family. But it's our family. It's ours. And it's not something that I want to do alone.

The 3 of us sat there in silence for a moment.

I think it could come true. I mean, I— that's probably why I'm crying. I don't know. I don't know what to say. I think I'm never going to do cootie catchers again with my 5th graders. We do those to practice our math facts, and we won't be doing that anymore.

Is that what those papers are called? Cootie catchers? I never knew what they were called.

Well, they're called cootie catchers in 5th grade language. So, um, yeah, it does seem like that's plausible, um, just because the other one happened. We've loved each other a long time, and he's a part of me, and I'm a part of him. And so, yeah, that— it worries me. Do you think that dream is going to come true?

You know, I've had dreams that are common. You know, breathing underwater. I think everyone's had that dream. And then other times I've had dreams where my legs are long and I can run. I can outrun anyone and anything. We all have so many different dreams and they never come true. And so when I think about this dream of 54, for a long time I thought it's going to come true because the other one came true. But I'm a few months into 54, and I feel like maybe I'm gonna make it through.

Let's plan on that. Okay. I mean, you've been carrying this since you were 15. Have you done things differently because you've had this out in front of you?

I think just recently, just this year, I feel like I've tried to be a little bit more aware. So yeah, I have tried to be more careful.

Has it affected any, like, our relationship? Have you— how is knowing that that date is ahead, has that had any effect on, like, you and I?

I don't think so. I don't think things have changed.

Do you love me more wondering if you're gonna die?

I love you, and I don't think any of this changes how, how much I love you. I think maybe the biggest way this has changed what I'm doing or how I approach things is in how I interact with other people, especially with my family, but also With people I work with and complete strangers. And so if indeed this is the last year of my life, I wanted to focus on that thing that's most important, and that is the relationships with people.

I would say you live with integrity, that you, you do live what's important to you. I'm going to really try to pull it together. I'm tired of crying now. Um, but this is a lot for me to take in today.

As they got ready to leave, Paul and Kim discussed his 55th birthday.

I will say that I'm really looking forward to this birthday.

Yeah, we need to plan something big.

We need to plan something big. Yeah.

Let's go on a trip.

Okay, but we have to be careful and maybe leave the day after.

In one of our final conversations, I asked Paul how he would live his life after he turned 55 in September.

I see turning 55 as being really positive for 2 reasons. I've made it to 55. Right? I made it through. But also, it's kind of the proverbial icing on the cake. For a long time, I felt like maybe I'll only make it to 54, and now I've made it beyond that when I turn 55.

Mm-hmm.

And I think I will carry a lot of that positivity with me, a lot of that, that I've learned over this last year to value people and relationships and events and experiences. I think I will carry that with me.

The more I talked with Paul, the more I realized his story is a universal story. The way he is thinking about his life is the way we should all think about our lives. Instead of worrying about our own mortality, More of us ought to say, I'm grateful to have gotten this far, and if I get any more time, well, that's just icing. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Kristin Wong, Annie Murphy-Paul, Laura Querelle, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. Our unsung hero this week is Jamie Stillings. Jamie is a photographer in New Mexico. We recently met on the sidelines of the TED conference in Vancouver. He heard my talk and reached out to ask to make a portrait of me. We carved out some time to meet, and he made a few images that made me look a lot better than I do. If you want to see one of those photos, go to hiddenbrain.org/mission. Thank you, Jamie, for making me think I don't have a face for radio. If you liked today's episode, please share it with a few people. If your friends are new to podcasting, please show them how they can sign up for our show and get all of our episodes. And if you'd like to hear more stories like this, you can help us make them. Go to support.hiddenbrain.org. That's support.hiddenbrain.org. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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