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Live Like You Were Dying is the unforgettable story inspired by Tim McGraw's #1 Country Music song of the same name. It weaves a tale of the miracles that happen once you stop being so busy with life that you actually have time to live it.
Millions have embraced the song's lyrics. Now experience the inspirational story that will touch your heart and soul.
A shrill whistle signaling the start of the night shift at the paper mill caused the walls of my office trailer to rattle. Standing at the window, I watched as smoke poured from the tall pipes that lined the top of the plant and twirled up into the dark Georgia sky. The smell of the mill overpowered that of the lukewarm coffee I was drinking, an odor that had almost made me sick the first time I experienced it. "The smell of money," my old college buddy, Jay Beckett, said of the stench that could cause even the hardest of men to curl his nose. When I dropped out of college to work for his start-up company, Beckett Construction, my wife's father had told me that I'd never make more than a laborer's wages. In just twenty years, I was making twice what my father-in-law did and now carried the title of project engineer on a business card. Sweat and long hours had paved the way for success, but the toll I'd paid could not be measured in dollars and cents.
The smell of money turned out to be an axis between my soul and my family. A dividing line that separated me into two halves until I stumbled through life feeling like the magician's assistant in a show I'd once seen.
At a resort theater in the Bahamas, I occasionally glanced at the engineers I was asked to entertain for the sake of renewing a company contract. While the magician with the red cape and black spandex pants guided a chain saw down the center of a white box, the assistant who lay inside never flinched. She just smiled and looked up at the ceiling that glowed with colored lights, withdrawn from the massacre that was taking place below.
While the tips of the assistant's sequined shoes sparkled, the engineers who sat next to me grimaced and sucked in their breath at the idea of the beautiful woman being ripped in two. But I just kept staring at her blue eyes and thinking that I knew how she felt, being torn away bit by bit from a part of your being. That night marked the first time that I'd missed an event in my daughter's life. The night she had walked across the stage at the local community center, looked at her teacher, and reached up her tiny hand for her kindergarten diploma.
Regret was a heavy opponent back then. I flew back to Atlanta crumpled against the plane window, feeling the weight that comes with bad decisions. But over time the trappings of more contracts and larger bonus payouts had tipped the scales of balance. Soon regret was nothing more than a feeling, a slight irritation that could be swatted away with the justification that I was missing family events in order to make those I loved happy with gifts that time could not buy. The rationale never had made any sense to my wife, Heather, no matter how many different ways I tried to explain it or how many times I called to say that I was sorry.
Seven years later I found myself answering my office phone and still offering the same explanations. This one was for my daughter's gymnastic event that I'd missed because of an employee who hadn't bothered to show up for work, but Heather was no longer listening. She was only talking, louder and louder, till I had to pull the phone away from my ear. Even from a distance her question cut through the cloud of excuses and left me remembering exactly how cold the airplane window felt against my face the night I leaned against it and tried to convince myself that work was more important than a kindergarten graduation.
Through the phone line my wife's question sounded like a riddle, but there wasn't any sign of playfulness in the tone. "Tell me something . . . are you just living to work, or working to live?"
A loud noise from the paper mill's compressor broke the silence, and my metal desk vibrated. At first I thought of acting like I hadn't heard her question. But Heather knew all of my tricks. Ignoring a question might work with my employees, but it never worked with Heather.
"What?" I finally asked.
"You heard me . . . Look, there's no use going over this for the hundredth time. What's done is done. Just promise me that you'll take a nap or something. There's got to be a place you can hole up in for at least thirty minutes. Working a straight double shift, three times in one week . . . missing Malley's gym meet. Come on, Nathan. It's insane."
"Yeah, tell that to the millwright who didn't show up for work tonight. 'A death in the family,' he said. Funny, they always manage to pull off a death when they need to."
"If you don't get some rest, you're going to end up dead from a heart attack or something. Look, we both know that you really don't have to work these hours anymore."
When I exhaled, I tried to cover the phone receiver. "It's shutdown. You know what it's like when it's shutdown. Repairs to the plant have to get done in a short amount of time. Time's money around here. When the plant's not running, nobody's making money, and when nobody's making money, nobody's happy."
When Heather sighed, she didn't bother to try to hide it. Her breath came through the phone line heavy and aggravated. I pictured her running her hands through the brunette corkscrew curls that bounced around her face and twirling the phone cord tighter around her wrist. "Whatever . . . just promise me that you'll get some rest. A little rest . . . a catnap . . . okay? I worry about you."
Shuffling through the soiled and wrinkled blueprints that draped over the metal desk, I accepted her plea without any resistance. We'd known each other for half of our forty-one years, but there was also so much she couldn't understand.
Before I hung up the phone, the trailer door swung open. A short young man with deep-set eyes, whose name was long lost among the sea of W-2 forms stacked on a card table next to my desk, motioned with his chin toward the plant yard outside. "We got a break to the rupture disk up on tower fourteen."
"You think you can handle changing it?" I asked and reached for the hard hat that hung on a rack behind the file cabinet. If only Heather was still on the phone, she could hear for herself why I had to stay at the job site.
The young man nodded. "Oh, yeah. I just need some backup. The thing is, Kyle didn't show up tonight . . . something about a funeral . . ."
"Yeah, I know all about Kyle," I said, never looking to gauge the young man's reaction.
Outside in the plant yard, rusted pipes and sparks from welding machines littered the concrete floor as men carrying buckets of tools made their way past us. Beyond the plant gates, the interstate hummed with traffic. Bright light from the plant spotlights rained down on us as though we were celebrities at a fancy black-tie event. But the only black ties were those made of grease and dirt, woven permanently into the shirts of the men and women who kept a steady stream of money flowing for the mill owners.
Climbing the ladder to the sixty-foot tower, I watched as the boy who was trying to be a man paused halfway up. "You okay up there?" I yelled.
He never looked back before climbing another few feet. It would be a cat-and-mouse game that continued for the length of our journey. If the millwright had shown up for work, I wouldn't be out here. The thought kept playing in my mind, stirring up the anger that caused me to climb faster until I was inches from the young man and the hardened clay that lined the soles of his work boots. "Am I fixing to have to light a match under you? I don't want to be up here till sunrise."
At the top of the tower, the crisp, early-March wind clipped against my face, and off in the distance, the high-rise buildings of downtown Atlanta sparkled. Hissing steam rose from the dome-shaped tower that held the disk. I motioned for the young assistant to put the tools on the floor of the catwalk.
If it hadn't been for the risk of releasing chlorine dioxide into the plant, I most likely would have told him to save the job for the morning crew. Turning to ask for the wrench, I found the young assistant holding on to the rail of the catwalk that circled the tower. Sweat trickled down the side of his stubbled face, which was growing paler by the second. "You gonna make it?" I called out.
He never looked away from the top of the tower that loomed ten more feet above us. At first he nodded and then shook his head. "The stairs got to me. I'm feeling . . . something's not right with my stomach."
Fishing through the box of tools he managed to place on the catwalk floor, I looked down at workers the size of ants. They scurried about the plant just like it was their own personal anthill. "You're not scared of heights, now, are you?" I yelled to the young man.
"No . . . but Kyle usually takes care of this."
"Yeah," I said. "Well, Kyle ain't here tonight." Part of me wanted to chew him out for not telling me in the first place that he was too yellow-bellied to do the job, but the other part of me wanted to laugh. "I tell you what," I said, strapping the gas mask around my neck. "You stand over there, glued to that rail, and when I lean down and hand you the old disk, you just lean out and hand me the new one. Sound like a plan?" The entire moment summed up my basic philosophy on life: if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.
As I climbed up the ten-foot ladder, the tower hissed like it was ready for a fight. I paused long enough to look out across the rows of pipes that created the plant's skyline. The bright spotlights overpowered the darkness, and even from a respectable distance, the heat from the lights singed my neck as good as any tanning bed that my twelve-year-old daughter argues that she is old enough to visit.
With the mask now in place and the rust-stained wrench in hand, I went to work. Three bolts came off of the old, cracked disk with ease. Then something scratched against my leg, throwing me off balance. My breath was heavy and echoed against the vinyl mask that fogged with each word I yelled. "Wait a minute. I'm still trying to get the bolt off of this one. Giv...
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A grave medical diagnosis, the ensuing quest for adventure, mended relationships, and a reconnection with God,
By FaithfulReader.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Live Like You Were Dying: A Story About Living (Hardcover)
Michael Morris is a name well-known to fans of Christian fiction, particularly novels that cross over well into mainstream bookstores. His 2003 release, SLOW WAY HOME, was named one of the best novels of the year by two secular newspapers in U.S. cities. LIVE LIKE YOU WERE DYING, a 178-page novella, may well receive similar accolades for the year 2004.
As country music fans might suspect, the book is based on the lyrics from a Tim McGraw hit of the same title, written by Tim Nichols and Craig Wiseman. Morris took the lyrics and fashioned a story that seamlessly integrates all the elements of the song --- a grave medical diagnosis, the ensuing quest for adventure, mended relationships, and a reconnection with God. In Morris's version, Nathan Bishop cheats death in an industrial accident, only to have the resulting x-rays reveal a much more serious problem. Weighing his medical options, Nathan decides it's time that he starts to live as if he were dying. That means, in part, doing risky things he's never done before, like skydiving and riding a bull, both of which are activities mentioned in the lyrics. That also means doing things he never took the time to do, like spending time with his wife and 12-year-old daughter. And finally, it means doing things he never wanted to do, like forgiving his father. I have to confess that I was fully prepared to dislike this book. I figured that not even Morris could avoid producing a book that seemed contrived, since the content would be forced to fit the lyrics --- and the lyrics of a country song at that. But Morris proved he was more than equal to the task. Nothing about this book felt forced or inauthentic, and there's none of the "fluff" that I anticipated in a book of this type. Among the many strengths: Morris's excellent command of the language, realistic dialogue (one of the aspects of quality fiction that too many authors fail to produce), and believable characters. In that last category, two of the standouts are Nathan's father and grandmother, two people who easily could have become stereotypes in the hands of a lesser author. Ron Bishop is reserved and remote, the kind of father who has never been able to show his affection. But Morris avoids casting him in a predictable light or overdoing it with a lot of commentary on why he is the way he is. Ron Bishop just is. And that makes him believable. Grand Vestal, Nathan's grandmother, gets my unofficial award for "best portrayal of an elderly woman." If, like me, you've noticed that elderly women in Christian fiction are nothing at all like many of the elderly women in your life, you'll be glad to meet Grand Vestal. Morris apparently recognized the fact that older women are, well, not your father's grandmother. They aren't necessarily the sweet, simpering, saccharine women who call everyone "dearie" in too many other Christian novels, nor are they necessarily feisty, oddball characters that exist somewhere else along the caricature spectrum. They're real, multidimensional people --- just like everyone else. Amazing that so few writers seem to realize that. Thankfully, Morris does. My first time through this book, before I knew I would be reviewing it, I made a note to myself on the end flap: "Excellent in every way." That assessment still stands.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Men can relate to this book,
By Father Knows Best "Sam Edsell" (Ft Wayne, Ind) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Live Like You Were Dying: A Story About Living (Hardcover)
First time reviewer. I have to say that this book is not at all "sappy." I very seldom read fiction but devour non-fiction. The song is the reason I picked up a copy of the book. This book is not War And Peace but it is not a trite little book. There is enough truth in here to make me buy copies for my four children. As a father I completely understood how the character felt torn between work and family. Maybe this is a book that more men can relate to - who knows. Bottom line is that the book is a good read.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Surprised And Satisfied,
By Kevin McPherson (Franklin, TN) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Live Like You Were Dying: A Story About Living (Hardcover)
We've all heard this song, at least if you listen to the radio at any point of any given day. However, I had never heard of this book. A friend recommended it and I'm glad that she did. This is not some little fluffy book like I first thought. It's a story about life and love that left me thinking about my own dreams. A well written book that is not to be missed. I predict that it will be a 'sleeper hit' that will become a bestseller because of word of mouth.
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