Why One Young Woman Is Selling Her Final Hours to Strangers

A look at the performance-art project of a dying 32-year-old
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 2, 2024 11:30 AM CDT
Updated Sep 7, 2024 4:15 PM CDT
Why One Young Woman Is Selling Her Final Hours to Strangers
   (Getty Images / Lazy_Bear)

At age 27 in 2019, Emily Lahey, a member of Australia's military who ran 3 to 6 miles a day, started getting headaches and other symptoms that doctors chalked up to sinusitis. When she started to lose vision in her left eye, however, doctors ultimately discovered a tumor in her skull. She was diagnosed with a rare cancer, which had metastasized and did not respond to chemotherapy. Only after other treatments had been found ineffective and her condition had worsened significantly was she allowed access, in the US, to a "cutting-edge" treatment, reports the Guardian, which looks at how Lahey is spending the time she didn't initially think she had: She's selling it off to strangers.

Though she's still dying, Lahey has now lived long beyond the four to six months doctors initially thought she had, and she's participating in a performance art project called Time to Live in which people pay for three minutes with Lahey. Sometimes they talk; sometimes they simply sit quietly with her in the art venue outside Sydney. The project was designed by the Australian Cancer Research Foundation to raise money for "world-class research" into cancer and the treatment of it. That's important to Lahey, since it was research like that that extended her time, though she doesn't know exactly how much time she has left. As she describes it in a video about the project, she sees that time as "not a clock running out, but a precious gift not to be wasted." Read the full story at the Guardian. (More Longform stories.)

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