What to do now? Oh, god, another existential crisis, at my age. At seventy-five. How utterly tedious. And true. I am seventy-five–crippled, bad heart, with only small amount of energy to use each day. And yet I have a large family and a whole lot of writing projects. I also have a garden, a big dog to walk, and a much too sizeable house that always needs cleaning.
It’s not that I don’t have answers. I do. And if I run out, social media will supply me with an endless array of cliches, memes, and bad advice.
But this is different. I think I likely have about five years left of a truly effective ability to write, read, study, research, edit. These are the things I love and with which I have also built a career. But it was a ‘career’ that careened unsteadily from necessity to possibilities, from desperation to small bits of good luck I then built on.
At this stage of my life I can be deliberate, make choices and take my time–what I have left of it. Around me, people are quietly falling away. They get sick. They move into care or die. Everyone carries on as usual. You’d think given the fact that most of my generation, the so-called ‘boomers’ are hitting their late seventies and eighties, how to prepare for death might be a subject. It’s never mentioned. Instead, most of us carry on as usual.
I think the admiration for someone who has made it to a late age is a bit misplaced; after all, it was luck that got them there. If we could choose the day we would want to die, many of us would die earlier than we do. I personally wish a medically assisted death was possible as soon as I started to be forgetful, or unable to write, or argue with my brilliant grandkids. What would be the point of that life?
Which of course, is the unanswerable question. Is any human life valuable just because it exists? In western culture we say it is, but we rarely act as if that is true.
My own life is as meaningful as I choose to make it. I have an urgent need to make some kind of sense of it although I still don’t know what that means. It continuing to work just persistence? How will I know if the work I am doing now isn’t as good as I want it to be? Old age is a lot like walking a minefield. So many things waiting to get me, among them illness, dementia, alcohol, stroke, heart attack. Everything I do now is more dangerous: walking by myself every day in the woods with my dog, riding horses, driving kids here, there, and everywhere. My night vision now is shit. So is my sense of balance. Not enough to stop me, yet. But when is that moment? It waits in the future. Not inevitable, just waiting. Such much of old age is about loss, including deaths of people I have loved and cherished much of my life.
Right now, getting up, dressed, and through the day is a small triumph. But not quite enough. My requirement for myself is that I have also accomplished something, finished part of an edit, mailed a manuscript, organized a writer’s event, or begun the lengthy process of writing a poem.
Yet I want something more that I can’t quite decipher, I say meaning, but is that it? Satisfaction? No I have lots of that.
Here, near the end of my world, I want what all of us want, at some point to know that what I did meant something in some way, however ineffable, however transient, to someone. People at funerals say tearfully, “We will remember you forever.” But they won’t. Very few people are remembered in history. Too often they were big men during a war somewhere. But history is not made by great men; it’s made by the second, the minutes, the hours, the days of ordinary life, of people doing their best. If there is someone in a family, or a culture, that in some way records these lives, they will be stay within the history. But most often people are forgotten within two or three generations.
I’m not looking for a forever project. My family, especially my grandchildren, are my forever project. That’s almost enough.
Old age is certainly the hardest thing I have ever done, and it will get harder, with no reward except death. There are no perks for dying well, other than the soporific sentimental stuff that is offered up at funerals. But I’m a writer. A writer’s job is to take meaning out of stories. This job never ends.
So why not make meaning from aging and death? Yes, it’s hard. All the more reason for doing it. Many people think writing about aging and dying is morbid. I don’t think it is. I think it is about understanding the last great challenge we all face at some point, to understand and make sense, not just of the stories of life, but the stories of death which is intrinsically bound up with life stories.
As part of a long poem, Wallace Stevens wrote:
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfilment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths
Death can make existence meaningless, it can also give life great meaning and great beauty. We are all dead before we are born, and then, in life, we have both a chance to make our existence meaningful, and our death as well.
Why not take that on?
Yes!
I so relate! I am a version of myself that I no longer recognize, and I resist the fading of my former self. My skin is pale and my hair white. I wonder: am I already a ghost? My formerly sturdy body, once a container of strong bones and flexible muscles, is now a noisy bucket of alternating aches and pains. Ironically, the days seem to lengthen as my life grows shorter. When I wonder what is in store, I remind myself that God uses people at every age: Sarah was 90 when Isaac was born, Abraham 100, and God made Abraham the father of many nations.
I suppose that we are all here on a temporary assignment from heaven. I think that it is in growing old that we come to understand this. Less visible in the day-to-day world, we are attentively watching as we move about noticing while remaining unnoticed. Perhaps we become more like God in this way and will be better able to commune with him when we meet in the forever after.
While the entirety of our lives may not be remembered by many or for long, we hold the memories that make up history. Though we may remain nameless, somehow, we will be alive whenever others look back in time. We will be part of a generation, a movement, an event, a slice of history, a part of the soil and the exchange of air. Our lives will be the mysterious once-upon-a-time from which new fairy tales will spring.