Mortality Comes Calling

We all are reminded of our own mortality from time to time — an illness or accident that could have been fatal, the death of a friend. When we are young, though the stark reminders that our time on this planet is limited, are quickly erased by the optimism of youth.

The passing of the years, though, brings the reminders more frequently.

A couple of events in recent weeks have touched me directly.

FIRST WAS THE DEATH of a friend and former colleague. He was half a dozen years younger than I, and when we first worked together he was in his early 30s. Our paths separated, and then we worked together again at another newspaper. Our careers, and our energy, were still on an upward trajectory, when he left for another opportunity.

We talked on the telephone every few months and saw each other only occasionally in the years that followed. But the friendship was one of those that that was not eroded by time and distance, and we always picked up with where we had left off. We did not dwell on aches and pains, and the barrier of distance leaves us picturing the other person as he was in days we were together.

In the past couple of months, we’d talked more often. He’d smoked for far too many years, and this winter had been particularly hard on him, sending him to the hospital multiple times with pneumonia. He was weakened, but each time we talked, he was confident that he was going to get better — and I believed he would get better, too. I would come visit, I promised, when he was feeling a little stronger. 

PNEUMONIA STRUCK again, though, and I did not realize until the last few weeks that he would not come home from the hospital.

I was taking comfort in the knowledge that he embraced life fully when word came that another friend, a contemporary, who had cheerfully fought cancer to a standstill for many years now was seeing the contest edge in the other direction. He is a realist, and, having toted up the cost of expensive drugs that at most could add only a few months to his life, he has decided to take as much enjoyment as he can in the time that remains.

All of this leaves me saddened, of course, and more conscious that the horizon looms ever closer.

But if youth is optimistic, age is stoic, and the Latin expression Dum vivimus vivamus  — is a "While we live, let us live" — becomes more relevant.

The poet A. E. Housman, I think, was both the optimist and the stoic when he wrote that  “… since to look at things in bloom fifty springs are little room, about the woodlands I will go to see the cherry hung with snow.”

There are no cherry trees here, perhaps, but pears and dogwoods will do nicely.

Repenting the Arrogance of Youth

I had occasion to spend some time in the waiting room of a clinic in Florida recently and was reminded of the arrogance of youth — my youth.

Just getting older had already changed my perspective, as aging does for most of us. Thankfully, I wasn’t a patient, so I was free to watch the others around me without being absorbed by my own woes. As might be expected in an area that is a magnet for retirees, most of the patients were older, and they were the people I had too little appreciation for in my long ago youth. Some shuffled along, barely raising their feet off the floor, some were stooped, others rode in wheel chairs. Some were morbidly obese, others emaciated. There were more stories there than in the waiting area of an airport.

I was transported back to my first time in Florida, fresh out of college and beginning my career. I didn’t know anything about St. Petersburg until I was hired sight unseen over the telephone by the St. Petersburg Times. My rudimentary research before grabbing my diploma and heading out did not prepare me for what I was to find. There were old people everywhere. Data for the 1960 census, released not long after I began work, confirmed what I observed: the median age for the census tract comprising downtown was 65 years.

Webb’s City in downtown was a sort of Walmart before there was Walmart. The median age there probably was closer to 75.

I HAD BEEN AROUND old people all of my life, but they were part of a broader population. They were great aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers. Even those older folks who lived alone were not isolated from those of other ages. Here, they were most often on their own. They had spent their working years in Detroit or Buffalo or Rochester, and they had come to Florida to claim their share of sunshine and warm breezes, often leaving kith and kin. Some of them lived in enclaves where children were not welcome.

Most of us on the reporting staff were young, and we didn’t think the so-called senior citizens were anything like our grandmothers or aunts. They shuffled down the sidewalk and lined up for the early bird specials at the restaurants. They wore pith helmets, plaid Bermuda shorts and black shoes and knee socks and waited for a weed to have the audacity to pop up from their plush grass. They crowded zoning board meetings to rail against spot zoning and filled the city council chambers to oppose tax increases. They talked to anyone who would listen — and to some who wouldn’t — about their children or grandchildren or their ailments.

We were not going to be like them. Somehow we believed that we would waltz into the sunset, slim and erect and energetic forever.

How arrogant we were.

Time has a way of eroding youthful arrogance, and we learn that there’s an awful lot we have little or no control over. No matter how lithe and erect we were, how many miles we hiked or how many rivers we paddled, time and gravity tug at us, and our genes betray us. Hands that could tie a fishing fly are gnarled with arthritis, and eyes that could see to thread a needle have difficulty making out the type on a page. Minds that could direct a complex business operation have trouble keeping a simple task in mind long enough to complete it.

TIME ALONE HAS broadened my understanding. Just observing those patients at the clinic pushed the process along. 

Carrying on into old age calls for a certain amount of bravery. Hopes and dreams can still burn bright in bodies that are enduring the storms that time brings. The will to live defies the gravity that bows the back or the cataract that dims the sight.

I am still youthful enough or arrogant enough to believe that aging does not have to embrace rigidity and bitterness and mean-spiritedness.

Perhaps living in a community of geriatrics is good for some, but I suspect homogeneity is not as conducive to maintaining a lively mind and an appreciation for diversity. Many of our neighbors fall roughly within our age range, but there are younger people in the neighborhood, as well.

We’re fortunate, too, that we live in a college community. Auburn University is a virtual picnic of cultural and entertainment possibilities, and the passion and energy of youth are a welcome antidote to fossilization.