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The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Tim McGraw.jpg


Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying."


As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them.


In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays."


Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu."


Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and giving forgiveness.  


Then there is the confusing bit: "And all of a sudden goin' fishi',/ Wasn't such an imposition/ And I went three times that year I lost my Dad."


That confused me because, frankly, three times a year fishing seems like an awful lot of fishin' to me. I fish maybe three times a decade. I suppose I might put it on my personal bucket list to get three fishing trips in within a single year some time. But ... probably not.


But I do suspect that the dying man might regard three times as only three times.


Is the dying man still speaking at this point? If so, is he saying this?


"Back in that year when I lost my Dad, I only went fishing three times, because I regarded it as an imposition, but now that I know I'm dying, I go much more often."?


Or is he saying, "I was diagnosed some time ago -- and am still alive. I'm happy that I received the erroneous diagnosis, because of the lesson it taught me, and because it encouraged me to go fishing with my father, which I was able to do three whole times before he died." ?












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  1. HenryFebruary 8, 2014 at 11:55 AM

    The second interpretation is better. It is consistent with his "loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and giving forgiveness," which immediately precedes the line you're interpreting.

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