I should warn you in advance: this blog post will be a little depressing. Its title comes from a Facebook post I saw a few months ago, in which a Facebook friend, although someone I don’t know personally, posted about a friend of hers, an author, who had recently died much too young, in her forties, after the publication of her first novel. The post made me so sad — so young, and just after her first novel had been published! I followed a link to the author’s website, and there it was: “This website is a work in progress.”

It felt like a punch in the chest. Here was a woman, younger than me, who was trying to build a writing career. She had just accomplished what is often the first big step, the publication of a novel. She was in the middle of creating her website. And then . . .

It was, inevitably, a moment of confronting my own eventual mortality, of wondering how many years I had left to write in and how much I could accomplish during that time. And I thought, “I’d better update my website.” But in the middle of that existential panic, I also had another thought: that no matter how long my life lasts, it will probably always be a work in progress. There will probably never be a moment when I say, “That’s it, I’m done, I finished what I came here to do.”

I remember reading that in an interview, Jorge Luis Borges, then in his 90s, told the interviewer, “Someday I hope to write the novel that will justify me.” There he was, famous and accomplished, but he wasn’t finished yet. And then I thought, when that moment comes for me, I hope not to be finished yet. I hope I’m working on a new project, thinking, “This one is going to be really good.”

At that point, the words “work in progress” became a promise rather than a sign of failure. I thought, I want to be a work in progress, up to the very end.

Who knows how many years any of us has left. Who knows what, among all the things we create, will last. All I can hope is that among all the things I create, for however long I can keep working, there will be something — a novel, a story, a poem — that will justify me. That will mean I have done whatever the bits of ancient stars that went into creating me were meant to accomplish.

(The image is Hilda by Carl Larsson.)