In recent years, I have realised how excellent life can be when I stop putting things off. So many perfect todays are usurped by the promise of “more time tomorrow”, “when you’re old enough”, “when we have more money”. There is never a guarantee of more time, but we always have now.
Learning to use my time with purpose has been bittersweet. It wasn’t exactly a choice – it comes from knowing that my old age is not guaranteed. But the perspective it has offered me has been worth the pain.
Let’s go back to 2006. My dad – a jolly, bronzed Australian man who calls everyone by the name of their car – is walking into a department store. He greets the woman at the front entrance (“How you goin’ there, Suzuki Swift?”) and moves towards the tech section. He’s buying a laptop, because he wants to tell his story, and that of our family – about how his stepfather made him enter through the back door of his house as a child; about discovering his half sister too late, and buying a headstone for her grave.
Another thing to know about my dad is that he has always wanted a backyard spa. Now, if you think this is a typically Australian thing to want, please let me clarify: it absolutely is not. A pool, perhaps – but a family hot tub is not a common cultural occurrence. After he buys his laptop, he is going to the spa shop to once again visit the hot tub he wants but never buys.
My dad never had a chance to write his story, to fill in the gaps in those tales for his children. He never bought his hot tub. Two days after he bought the laptop he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. One week later, he died. Soon after, my brother Paul was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer, and my sister with pre-cancerous polyps in her stomach, and I found myself sitting in a genetic counsellor’s office talking about my 97% chance of developing cancer myself. That means I too am likely to get sick.
Before my brother was diagnosed, he had spent his entire 20s travelling the world on a dollar a day. He had seen everything. Done it all. After he and my dad died, after I started to accept that those things that happen to “other people” had happened to me, my shock and grief crystallised into certainty: I am determined now to see as much of the world as my brother did; to talk to strangers, turn the music up, be overstimulated.
It is not that my loss has freed me from fear. It is that my fear of not having tried, tasted, seen everything is more powerful than my fear of failing. I do things I am afraid of because I am more afraid I’ll die having not done them.
I am afraid of the ocean. I live in Australia, where the water is a source of danger. But I love seals – I spent my entire lockdown following the story of a seal who had left the ocean and swum up the river. So my partner, Tim, bought me a day swimming with seals for Christmas. I was scared, but I got on the boat. I packed my body into the too-tight wetsuit, donned my snorkel and jumped off a boat into the open ocean.
The first thing the instructor said was: “Now, there’s a small shark underneath us so just keep swimming over the way, guys.” I wanted nothing more than to get out of that water, but I hadn’t seen the seals yet, and so I stayed. I later found out the sharks were baby Port Jackson sharks, which are best described as a cloud Pokémon without teeth. But I felt like Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson. Brave.
My comedy show, Average Bear, tells the story of my brother, my father and my health. I tell stories for a job for two reasons: because I like being on TV (fancy events, people send you free kombucha) and because stories are all we have. They are how we experience and categorise time, lessons, love, skin, chips, whisky, heartbreak, the Fast & Furious franchise.
I mourn the men in my family. I mourn my imagined old age. But the thing I mourn the most is my father’s stories. And so I tell mine on stage, on screen. I’m also telling the stories of the men who didn’t have time to tell theirs. And people listen because they too have a dad, a brother, a ticking clock. They are all running out of time too, and they’re desperate for someone to tell them how to spend it. So I tell them. Spend it laughing, drinking, telling people you love them. Quit the job. Get on the plane. Order off-menu. Buy the hot tub. Dump him, babe! Today in colour is worth a thousand blurry tomorrows.
Your future is not guaranteed. And isn’t that fucking freeing? If you found out you had less time to live than the average bear, how might you spend it?
Michelle Brasier will perform Average Bear at the Soho theatre in London from Mon 6 to Sat 11 Mar 2023
