Perspectives

I'm sixty-sucking-one this week. I'm old. In my fifties, I used the F-word to count my way through that decade. Instead of sucking. I do not particularly like aging for two reasons. Regardless of the hype to the contrary, I am physically less of the man I was 20 years ago. I don't like that. But even more than that I'm closer to being dead.

And, I so love life. I'm one of those guys who says, "I want to live forever." I do. Puh-leeeese, do not send me your favorite Biblical passage promising eternal bliss as a footstool or nightstand or fawning, singing acolyte to God. I'm talking about life life. Life where choices have to be made. Life where pain is commonplace. Life where death is the best man or gorgeous bridesmaid at every celebration.

That's one contradiction about death. It makes life precious.

That may be the downside to eternal life (if it were an option), what would get you excited? Actually, it's a common enough theme in fiction. The bored aristocrat —yawn, yawn — the guy with the lavish English gardens who speaks fluent Italian, reads Greek and shoots skeet like James Bond in "From Russia With Love." And the poor chap, he's so bored. My brother says, "Life is boring to boring people." I tend to agree with Uncle Stevie. But acknowledging that "remote" possibility doesn't staunch my longing for more time.

My wish to live forever is, no doubt, predicated on a number of things. My health is still good, as far as I know. And isn't that the damned truth. You reach a certain age, oh, say, sixty-sucking-one, and you know folks who just up and die. Young people. Not people who enlisted for combat and subsequently died being all they could be. But educators who wake up with a headache and are dead 11 months later (my sister at age 54 of glioblastoma multiforme). Or, killed in traffic accident. Or, had her breasts removed and then died cancerous anyway. Here one day and gone tomorrow.

Actually that is how I feel about what I hope is the 81 or so years I am alive. Here one day, gone tomorrow. That's about what I'll get. 83 years. And it is so short, so brief a time span as to be — here today, gone tomorrow. And because I am healthy I want more. I'm human, I want. More life. More happiness. More joy. More love. And to have that in life requires that you have more pain. More sorrow. More heartache.

That is one of life's true dichotomies. To have exhilaration you will have doubt. And disappointment. And despair at times. And each of us has some internal "scale" that constantly evaluates and answers, "How am I doing today?" And the reply you give to yourself is what puts the skip in your step or the wiggle in your walk. Or the giggle in your talk.

So life still excites you and you want more. Yet, alas, sigh, more is a finite number. I've been seriously aware of my own mortality and what a screw life is at the end because you've acquired all this "perspective" and then shazam, it's over. How fair is that? At age 21, one of those light bulbs went off, you know, one of those — they hang from an ancient electrical cord dangling from an open rafter in a rustic, remote Minnesota cabin. Primitive. You're standing next to it and the chain hanging from the dirty bulb is swinging as "POP!" On goes that light in your mind like the bright bolt of illumination that it is and something concretely registers in your mind.

The last time this had occurred was with my father while standing on our front porch at age 16 at 2 a.m. one hot July morning with the taillights of the police car fading down the street. My father got his left eyeball four inches from my right eyeball and succinctly asked, "When are you going to learn?" He sternly turned in his purple flannel robe and went back to bed leaving me to ponder just that question. That particular light bulb experience was an important lesson.

My light bulb experience five years later wasn't a lesson but a recognition — about life having a "very" real stop point. And, that at age 21, I was already a quarter cooked! And here I am at sixty-sucking-one, wanting more. Good Golly Miss Molly! Three-quarters in the can!

Friends, people say, oh, you're not old, Chris. It's only people my age or older who say that and have any believability quotient. I subscribe to a lot of magazines and see a lot of movies, I know old and I am it.

As much as I am disgruntled by the inherent unfairness of it all — my not living for a nanosecond-like 10,000 years — I'm totally OK with it, too.

"Marcus Welby," as my sainted mother used to say. Might as well be — accepting of one's fate.

The crux of the matter is how to live life. How to shove as much of what you love and want "into" your life right up to the day you die. And then cross your legs, hopefully sigh thoughtfully, and expire. Who-o-o-o-oooosh! Here today. Gone tomorrow. My mother died like that.

I've been thinking of giving death a name. And "Chuck" sounds good to me. By giving death a name we would personalize him a bit more. He'd become more accessible. You know when you're with a woman and you overhear something to the effect "Aunt Flow" is visiting. Well, if Aunt Flow can personalize a menstrual cycle, Chuck, sure as "My Friend" can stand in (be the — wink, wink — code word) for death. The applications are endless. "Chuck took your Granny away, Little Mary. Don't cry." I'm too much. Hah!

It's not the dying, it's the ending.

"Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more." Shakespeare said that.

OK, we have this wonderful consciousness that quickly lets us know it's all temporary. Even knowing our outcomes, life has us wanting more. It could be construed as cruel but that begs the question of intent.

It simply is. And to the degree that we have control over our lives and destinies I so recommend that we all embrace what life we have left with the same gusto, verve and pleasure as the newborn babe suckles at his mother's breast.

M-mm-M-mm, Good.

I'm in heaven! Life is. Even at sixty-sucking-one.

I said earlier, and I quote myself, "It's not the dying, it's the ending."

No, my good friend, it's the living.