What if you had one year left to live?

Imagine this. You visit your doctor for your annual physical. Strictly routine.

She studies your lab work with her usual casualness; you are already thinking about the dry cleaning you have to pick up. All at once, you notice that wrinkles are appearing in her forehead where Botox had seemed to permanently remove them.

The tapping of her pen on the desk is increasing staccato; it isn't a Barry Manilow song she is drumming.

And then it happens. She looks up at you over her glasses. She tells you what you always feared you would hear but never really thought you would.

"You need to get your affairs in order," she says, delivering the line probably like Meryl Streep would. Only this is no movie. You are going to die.

It is hard to imagine, to really feel. No more sunsets, nor more pina coladas, no more hugs from your loved ones or smelly kisses from your dog.

What if you had one year left to live?

Stephen Levine, a remarkable poet and healer, has pondered this very question up close and personal. Not as someone who has an actual deadly diagnosis, but as someone who has decided to dedicate a year of his life to the prospect of "one year to live."

In his book with that title -- "One Year to Live: How To live This Year As If It Were Your Last" -- he notes that in most cultures and spiritual traditions, it is considered "an act of wisdom to prepare for death throughout life."

One person he talked to, who actually had this death sentence, reported: "I felt not as though my life was being taken away but as though it had been given back to me. I was going to die and my life was completely my own."

If you had only one year left to live, what choices do you think you would make about how to live your remaining life?

I would like to think that I would not worry about paying bills, getting a tummy tuck or figuring out how Donald Trump does his hair. I would hope that I would do something meaningful, significant.

Maybe I would devote myself to all of the good works I have dreamed about doing, but never gotten around to.

Perhaps I would really rather spend my last year blowing all of my sep-IRAs and credit cards on a yacht, sailing around the world with the best wine Santa Ynez has to offer and a few other unnamable pleasures.

In his book, Levine says that the question of what to do with our last year of life reminds us of how much we have forgotten.

"A part of us begins to panic at the thought that we haven't had quite enough time to leave something valid behind. There have been so few moments when life was all it was cracked up to be. So much that might have been different had the heart not been

We tend to become immersed in the flow of our lives, rarely pausing to reflect on how we got so far down the "river of life"... and so fast! We don't pause long enough to really see, to take a hard look at what remains unloved and unloving in our lives.

Why wait for a terminal diagnosis before opening up to the opportunity to heal that which needs healing, to forgive that which needs forgiven, to find gratitude for all that we have to be grateful for?

So few of us can afford to put this work off any longer because almost no one knows the day on which the last year begins.

If you had one year left to live ... what would you do?

Dr. Michael O.L. Seabaugh is a Cape Girardeau native who is a licensed clinical psychologist in Santa Barbara and Santa Monica, Calif. Contact him at mseabaugh@semissourian.com.