DEATH BY HIP AND OTHER CONSIDERATIONS
If you're a senior who denies thinking about dying, you're lying
There is often a compulsion at the start of a new year to peel back the layers not just of the months gone by, but of the decades past, so as to reflect and perhaps gain wisdom.
This is not about that. Because, well, COVID.
This is about looking ahead. And if you are of an age — that is, collecting a pension of any kind — chances are your fanciful thoughts run not just to whether there will ever be a regular major league baseball season again but, well, mortality.
Anyone of such an age — let's say 68 — is a big fat liar if they say they never think about death, never check the obituaries for birthdates or familiar names, never greet the news of a friend's passing without that prickly fear that the road ahead offers far less mileage than the well-travelled one behind.
Before I retired, I had to decide how to apportion my pensions. The big question from the experts was based on this guesstimate: How long did I think I was going to live? My random, non-actuarial answer: 83.
Don't ask. Just know that it seems I have an obsession with death.
Not the means by which the end comes (odds are cancer), not the curiosity of what happens next (probably nothing, though there are a few people I need to have a serious sit-down chat with) and not even the inevitability of it all (despite Johnny Carson's insistence that he was going to buy his way out of it), because no one gets out of here alive.
And let's not even talk about death by hip, which BC (Before COVID) seemed the most perilous of all senior ailments, given statistics boldly state that if you break your hip over the age of 65, your chances of greeting the white light within a few years are significantly scary.
If you see ice at our age, it had better be in a cocktail.
No, I am much more concerned with the handling of the end. How those circling in my small orbit will cope, how soon they will forget about me and just what, if anything, I have done that will be memorable.
The truth, of course, is they will cope, they will soon forget and, well, nothing much.
And, so, I talk about it. Make jokes about it.
When I am dead, I am going to miss so much about being alive, I frequently tell my grandchildren.
Not just them, obviously, or the rest of my family and friends.
But things. Ice cream. Shark Week. Coconut. My beach cottage. Cashmere.
The crack of a baseball bat. Spicy chicken karaage. Magnolia blooms. Fresh snow on the mountains. Rib-eye steak. Geraniums. A warm duvet. Lava cake. A new lipstick. Heated car seats. A Maui sunset. A bird's nest in a bare tree. The crisp turn of a newspaper page.
And I tell them that once I am gone, a Viking funeral would be a fitting sendoff, but at the very least they must pack me about occasionally — by dusty Ziploc is fine — so I don't miss weddings and births and graduations and such.
“There she goes again,” they say, eyes a'roll.
Here's what I also tell them: Despite trite catchphrases, we don't live every day to the fullest.
Instead, we live every day like we think there will be many more, happily plodding along. We eat, sleep, laugh, cry, work, play, love, hate, binge-watch Bridgerton.
And then it's over. And that is how it should be.
For it is in the ordinary where our lives flourish, in the ritual and mundane where astonishing beauty is found, in chocolate lava cake and a grandchild's grin, in the realization that there is no great secret to life except that life is extraordinary.
And if we have lived every day knowing this, there will be many things to miss.
It is in the ordinary where our lives flourish, in the ritual and mundane where astonishing beauty is found.
I am much more concerned with the handling of the end. How those circling in my small orbit will cope, how soon they will forget about me and just what, if anything, I have done that will be memorable. Shelley Fralic