Posting is a bit late today: reflections
Posting is a bit late today. One reason is that this morning I heard of the death of an old friend I hadn’t really seen in many years. The death was expected – I already knew this person was very ill – but the event stirs up memories and thoughts about the passage of time.
Getting old is no joke. Right now, I’m not even what I ever thought of as “old,” because when I was very young I had relatives who were well into their eighties but never seemed old to me. At this point, I’ve come to think that “old” starts around 95. And I keep revising that turning point upwards as I inch upwards myself.
But the truth is that more and more people I know are ill or are dead. That’s inevitable and yet sobering, very sobering, when it happens.
Growing old isn’t psychologically easy, and that’s in addition to the physiological changes. I’ve been wrestling with it in various ways myself. For now I’ll just add this, from one of my favorite poems:
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
Even we,
Even so.
[ADDENDUM: Please see this previous post for more ruminations on the subject, plus another poem).
I am sorry, Neo. Even when death is not a surprise, it’s a shock.
Molly G:
Thanks.
The person who died today was someone I really was only in much contact with about 35 years ago. But it’s still sad, and it brings home the passage of time.
I’m watching my father (76) go through the same experience, as his old friends pass away one by one. I’ve wryly given it the name “The Last Man Standing Contest”.
You have my condolences.
KRB
Yes, sorry to hear, neo. I’m saddened even when someone I didn’t like much dies. “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls” and all that.
I read somewhere that 67 is the new 60 in medical terms, that is today’s 67 year-old is about as healthy as a 60 year-old fifty years ago.
This may have something to do with all our 70-something presidential candidates.
Yes, as we grow older death comes closer. I hope your friend passed quietly.
When I was 7 a favorite aunt died of pneumonia. I asked mom if I was going to die? She said, “I hope you live a long happy life, but yes someday you will die.” I was shocked. Then she pulled me into lap and said, “Don’t dwell on it, you have your whole life ahead of you. Go outside and climb your favorite tree.”
This conversation has stayed with me all my life. I did take her advice and climbed high up an ash tree.
Kae Arby:
Please see this previous post.
My mom now in her late 80s is the last in our family of her generation and it’s hard on her and it’s tough to know what to say to her about it. And that’s just family the amount of friends that have passed over the years is huge. She really has no long time friends left.
Seeing her age (she is in fairly good health for her age) and all that goes with it has really made me think about the idea of living to a very old age.
A subject with which I am too closely connected.
I am now trying to put together a 70th reunion of my high school class. It was a class of 29 promising young people. All turned out to be pretty good citizens. All the men served in the military. All the women were successful in their endeavors as wives, mothers, employees, businesswomen, etc. Today, there are nine of us left. Which speaks well of the group’s longevity, I think. Only four of us can still travel, so we’ll get together, but all of us will provide bios and pictures to share our thoughts/memories with one another. It’ll probably be our last.
It’s quite obvious to me that the end of the trail grows ever closer. Loss is now a constant. Loss of friends, of family (my younger brother died in May), of casual acquaintances, and of physical abilities. My grandfather told me that old age wasn’t for sissies. I now know what he meant.
In spite of all the losses, my life is still filled with love. (My wife and daughter love me, and I them.) My memories of what I consider to have been a fortunate life are still with me. I cope with my health issues as best I can. What more could an old codger ask for?
I’m beginning to see lots of obituaries for people my age, and for people who were famous when I was very young. It’s sobering, and sad. Not quite as sad, though, as my younger friend who died in June at age 51, or the little baby, age 8 months, a relative of a friend, who never left the NICU and just passed away. The best plan is to get my house in order, my mind, and my relationship with God and other people in order, because although the psalmist asked the Lord to tell him the number of his days, we don’t know that.
One of my friends had three friends / relatives pass away just this year, some expected and one decidedly not (younger than her, and she’s only in her forties).
My mother finally quit going to funerals in her late seventies; she said there were two or three a week, and she just couldn’t take it.
However, her own funeral at 83 was very well attended, because, as a middle school teacher in a small town, many of her students and their families were still young enough to come!
Thanks for the link to Lieder Archive; it was new to me, and very interesting.
It went to a redirect, BTW; here is a new one:
https://www.lieder.net/lieder/get_text.html?TextId=11130
Mr. Meredith’s poem seems to have numerous musical settings, which I can well understand. None of the links went to any of them, however, so I looked up Copeland’s separately; I confess that I did not care for it, although I like most of his works. A little too much art in the lieder, and high soprano voices are among my least favorite, but the music did fit the text.
No edit again today. Copland link is here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WXruH6dtv0
I found some biographical info about Meredith here.
https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/dirge-in-woods/
“George Meredith’s mother died when he was five, and he spent much of his childhood at boarding schools. Meredith’s books of poetry and fiction are notable for their close attention to how people really talk and think as well their portrayals of men and women as equal, which was uncommon in Victorian literature. Meredith, who lived most of his life in England, received both the Order of Merit and the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature in recognition of his literary work.”
It is strange and sad living with an increasing number of ghosts.
Earlier this month, I wrote a poem about it :
As I approach the next decade
Do I wonder, as before?
What in terms of heaven lies
Beyond what’s called death’s door?
No, not so much now do I wonder
For I am happy to be
Alive and full of earth’s delights:
Senses, and even memory.
I like the look on my dog’s face
The rooms that stood firm before
Last night when I bedded down
To see the dreams in store
I like the feel of this leg ’n that.
And I like the swing of an arm.
I like seeing all the familiar sights.
And this coffee does no harm.
A day spreads from beyond somewhere
To be lived and lived alive
I need not entertain theories
Of celestial lights and jive.
Inside out death’s door has swung
And things are turned around:
I need not tunnel to a distant heaven
For the splendour is here on the ground.
Last Sunday I attended the funeral of a high school classmate. 57 years old. I hadn’t seen him in a long time, but we were Facebook friends and exchanged messages every once in a while. Getting older hits you when folks your age die of natural causes instead of accidents.
neo,
Sorry to hear your day was blue, but it does seem important to effectively moving forward to occasionally stop and reflect on the passage of time.
Regarding your comment in the link’ed post and your decrease in vivid dreams; I find what I eat and drink and when I eat and drink it has a big affect on my dreaming, or lack thereof. Caffeine consumption seems especially critical. The less caffeine I consume, and the earlier in the day I consume it (a longer gap before sleeping) typically means great, clear, lengthy dreams. There is a similar trend when I eat less, especially before sleeping. So, maybe try a day with little to no caffeine and going to bed hungry and see if your dreams return?
My mother’s family sounds like yours, lots of longevity on her mother’s side. Her mother was a delightful woman. I remember her in her 90s wondering why she was still alive and viewing it as a burden she had to bear. Now, she never complained, was a very hard worker and incredibly unselfish. She didn’t use the word, “burden,” but she would say that all her friends, her husband, all her peers and older relatives… were gone and wonder why “the good Lord” hadn’t taken her yet. Even though she was in remarkable physical and mental health for her age being the “last leaf” was a psychological struggle. One of the strongest humans I have ever known.
Rufus T. Firefly:
I never consume caffeine.
And when I go to bed hungry, I can’t get to sleep for hours and hours and hours.
The dreams come and go. Every now and then I still have some vivid ones. But nothing like I used to.
It is quite amazing that, although we all know that no one can escape, that there is only one end for all of us, and that we will, each one of us—some sooner, some later, some peacefully, some not so peacefully—eventually die, yet we quite often manage to keep that inevitable end from our everyday consciousness.
And, thus, we usually live our lives as if there would never be an end to them.
But, as a lot of religious literature says—urging us to join up now—“we can never know the day or the time” (of our passing).
Thus, I happen to think the best advice for living is to live each day as if that day is going to be our last day, and to observe and savor each moment of every day and each experience in it; to cram each day full of vivid and meaningful experiences. (I wish I could take my own advice, but preference, habit, and routine settle in.)
For me, as I see it at this moment, the end will be a leap into the great unknown.
Will it merely be a leap into non-being, into oblivion?
Should we heed the poet Dylan Thomas’ advice, and
“Not go gentle into that good night,
Old Age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”…?
It is said, rather poetically, that we are all ultimately “star stuff.”
Will I eventually end up as some atoms that are part of a star—just like the star that produced some of my original atoms, the cycle repeating— or, perhaps, floating as particles in the air, as some part of the Earth, a bird, a river, a frog, or a tree?
Or, will it be a leap into something like the “Bardo” as the Tibetan Buddhists believe, where, after my death, my spirit will be tempted by a chaotic procession of all sorts of beings, demons, and situations, I will be judged and, depending on what attracts me the most, what decisions I make, I will be reborn into a higher or lower position on the Wheel of Life and Death; as an animal, or an insect, or as a human being–and as a human being in good or bad circumstances.
And, if my life has been especially meritorious, and I can keep to an iron mental discipline, I may end up as a Bodhisattva, in the Buddhist version of Heaven (whatever you may believe that to be), now outside of, exempt from ever having to again travel around on the Wheel of Life and Death.
Funny, that this general Tibetan Buddhist scheme of things is so similar in some ways to the travel of the soul—the Boat of a Million Years a part of it—believed in by the ancient Egyptians.
Or, raised a Christian as I was, will I be traveling that ol’ tunnel of light to Heaven.
The thing is, nobody knows for sure.
Thus, the Greatest Mystery.
neo,
Thanks for the link. I had not seen that post prior. I can top that; I have never had so much as a cup of coffee. Not a drop!
Regarding the litany of beverages you don’t like, does your dislike of “milky liquids” extend to malts, milkshakes, egg creams?! I hope not. If so, you are missing out. Few things in life better than a strawberry milkshake or a vanilla malted.
Snow on Pine,
I get the gist of your philosophy, but living every day like it’s your last can mess up your future. Why stay late at the office to earn that promotion, why invest money, why marry, have children?
Rufus T. Firefly–Not advocating ditching the wife and kids, your job, and your mortgage, grabbing a climbing rig, and heading for the Himilayas.
It need not be “exotic.”
What I am advocating is–while you are alive and kicking–trying to be fully “present” in as many moments as you can manage each day, to lift your head up from your usual round of routine–which blinds you to what you have become accustomed to and, now, just take for granted–and to actually look around you, and to fully appreciate, savor, the people around you and your relationships with them, savor every part of your environment and, perhaps, even, look up at the stars at night, and wonder.
Since George Meredith, then R. Vaughan Williams’ wordless setting of The Lark Ascending [YouTube, 16:05, 1972: Iona Brown violin, Sir Neville Mariner & The Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields]
Look at it this way.
If you knew that you would soon lose your ability to hear, wouldn’t you try to soak up all of the audible experiences you could, and savor them?
If you knew that you would soon lose your ability to see, wouldn’t you try to see everything around you will special intensity, and soak up those visual impressions?
If you knew that, soon, you’d very likely be isolated, all alone, and never have any further contact with any other human being, wouldn’t you try to enjoy, to cultivate, to savor every one of your contacts with your fellow human beings?
What is death apparently but–among other things–the absence of sight, and sound, and contact with others?
I’m 75 and I agree, old age isn’t for sissies. You just have to take each day as it comes. I like the way Clint Eastwood puts it: “The secret is that you just don’t let the old man in” You don’t give up.
Here’s Hank Williams on the subject
https://youtu.be/wawYQG8E3es
My husband finds many of his former classmates on Facebook – they keep each other up to date on the demise and current health of friends.
Last week, although I am 68, I felt like 88 – tired, sore, and barely hanging on. Today, I woke up refreshed (although still stiff and sore in my knees), and ready to enjoy life again. A lot of our mood depends on health. When we are sick, we just lose that zest.
My goal for next year is to lose weight – not sure how much, but sufficient to have my knees no longer sore. That, alone, will go a long way towards making me feel younger.