Here One Moment, Liane Moriarty

You’re on a flight when someone gets up and starts walking down the aisle giving predictions to the passengers on when they are going to die and how. That’s the start of this book, and how those predictions change the way 6 passengers (their predicted deaths are not far away) shape and change their lives around what an older woman, who became famous as “the death lady”, after a few of the passengers die exactly as she predicted. The idea – if you were told you had only a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try and disrupt your destiny? For some, they did. For others, they didn’t. A woman starts her son in swimming classes before he can walk because she predicted the child would drown at age 7; another man is to have a workplace accident within the year, so his wife tries to make him quit his job, work from home… anything but go to work; the airline stewardess is going to die of self-harm very soon. If free will doesn’t exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, then why apologize for them?

Free will, destiny, grief, love, the endless struggle of your mind telling you one thing and having control over your actions whether you like it or not. The cherish of every moment until there is no more. In the end, of course the woman was not a psychic, she was having a mental breakdown over grief from losing her husband. She was dehydrated and doesn’t even remember doing what she did. But, Moriarty may have been saying that it is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth that we hopefully will begin to live each day to the fullest. In the end, each day is all we have.