I am 69 now, and how have I reached this age? I was aware all the time. Interiorly I could be 20, 40, even 50, but time has brought me to this point ineluctably. Fascinating, for the exterior self has weathered, grown not a little creaky and grayer and less efficient, yet the edifice stands. That is only part of it. The shock of 69 is still with me. I have lived perhaps too long.
Inside I feel not so old, perhaps more mature, perhaps. Inside I have not been weathered. I have been stressed and tested. I have endured great adversity. Death and dying are now more imminent than ever, although always present at any time in life. That far off place which we think of when we are younger now seems very close by or next store, like the neighbor. Time has run down my leg like piss, largely unseen and unfelt.
Suddenly, goes the cliche, I’ve reached an age that alarms or makes me realize more than ever I am mortal man. No longer can I play the game that growing older is over there. I realize it is here, in my face, in spades. I cannot run. I cannot hide, as time manipulates me into the cognizance of 69, not 39, or 49. It is not melancholy, I feel. I don’t rue much, for I know that much of our lives are unlived. We have been damn fortunate to have just been given existence, although the awareness of it more than harries us throughout our lives. I am only slightly encouraged by my writing, or creativity, which forever makes me age-free — or young, for words and thinking express durational time, sweet time, and not the arc of chronology.
I have asked my son who lives in Chicago to try to see me more often, as time is short and we need to engage one another, for he and I know one another and yet we are ignorant of each other. No man knows himself, and no man can know another. The best we can share are our impressions and approximations — our defined illusions — of the other.
I live with the knowledge that I have had a good run, so many die at earlier ages. Grateful for that, I take philosophic comfort in that I could absent the world having done a few good things with my life. It was a fast crapshoot and the dice skittered and bounced crazily and smacked against the wall, for it was a good throw and I didn’t come up deuces.
At 69 reminds me that I must consider and reflect even more as I near my end. I must resolve not to seek pleasure so much as resolution, completion and loving more than I can at this time. Jane is much younger than me and in that is my last throw of the dice. If i can pass the torch on to her, I would be very satisfied. And what is that torch? To be freer than she is now, to be more creative than what she is now, to attain a greater sense of awareness and to always struggle to reach what she cannot. For these injunctions have driven me. They are good ones. Perhaps they would embolden her.
This maddening expression of life, this spark between birth and death is agonizingly unfathomable. In a peculiar way we do not own our lives for the on/off switch is held by someone or something elsewhere. For some life is continuous, heaven and a hereafter — oh! you cowards! You wish to continue, you greedy people. For me it is bewildering to have the moment and then to be snuffed out. It is a cosmic tease, perhaps an axiom of time and space, for we do see and we are aware and the only creature on this planet to contemplate its end. A devilish, a fiendish existence — and wonderful and majestic as well, has been given to each of us; perhaps this explains metaphorically why we cry at birth, really wail. Whatever, that is what is.
Eventually no one survives to remember us in all our spastic glory and evanescence. What is to be made of all this? Look up at the night sky until you cannot take the implications of it any longer for it contains great terror, loneliness and dreadful sadness. Perhaps the best we have is love for one another as we go down into the sea.
We all will be gone. My last wish is not heaven or meaning, but an awareness that grasps my hand and wishes me love, bon voyage and peace as I wade into my eternal rest — unless, that is, I come back as a giraffe. Who knows? We assuredly don’t.
Leave a Reply