You Have to Acknowledge the Losses

I’ll be travelling Saturday and Sunday.  I’ve got a meeting with the boys up in northern New England.  I’m driving up Saturday morning and driving home Sunday late morning.  Then I have two long days at work Monday and Tuesday.  So, posts will be on a best-efforts basis.

But my life has always been (from my point of view) on a best-efforts basis.  None of us has much (if any) control over the vicissitudes of life.  The weather, our health, the actions of family, friends and especially enemies and total strangers intervene to make the best laid plans of mice and men playthings for the gods.

So, all that is true.  But working our way through all of the twists and turns of life is infinitely compelling.  Even if we have a mundane, even boring week we hear about someone’s disaster, someone’s tragedy.  Someone sentenced to death, someone struck down with awful injury.  And when these are good friends; good people, you’re stunned for a second, “How could that be?  I just saw him.  He was solid and animated; busy!  How could he be dead or dying?”  But very soon he’s gone.  Pretty soon you struggle to remember details of recent visits.  People fade out of our lives.

Well, it’s a matter of bandwidth.  I can only concentrate my mind on a very few things at a time.  So, the periphery has to stay there at the edge.  If someone I haven’t seen in almost exactly fifty years dies, even tragically, only a moment can be spared to acknowledge the loss.  You can only hope that the last fifty years were packed with significance and striving for some lasting impact on the people around him.

I guess what’s important for me is to reflect on whether I have achieved any lasting impact on those around me.  I know of at least one affirmative.  I have impacted Camera Girl in a lasting way.  She has been irritated by me for fifty years now.  That’s got to be significant to her!  To a lesser extent I’ve left some impact on my children and an even more tenuous impact on their children.  I’ve had friends and family in my life.  That counts for something.

Well, I guess it’s the nature of life that as we age, we begin to anticipate death.  How will it intersect with life?  How much warning will there be?  I’ve known some people who were terrified of it.  I’ve known others who were serenely calm about it.  I remember many years ago as a teenager I was working in a hospital and I asked a middle-aged man why he was in the hospital.  He smiled at me and said, “I’ve got a touch of the C.”  I looked at his chart later and he had metastatic bone cancer.  He died a day later.  But he took it all in stride.  So, there is a continuum of human attitude toward mortality.

Recent events around me have got me thinking of such things.  I used to say that the break even point in life is fifty.  If you were allowed fifty years of healthy life then you couldn’t rail against fate as having played you dirty.  If you didn’t dawdle fifty would allow you to raise a family and leave a mark on the world.  Of course, as you get older you can see how sixty and seventy enhance the satisfaction of seeing the future come to fruition.  But the fifty number still makes sense to me as a break-even point.

Okay, enough maudlin sentiment.  Mortality is a fact of life.  But every once in a while, something around you catches your attention and you realize that the stage is changing.  Faces appear and then disappear.  You have to acknowledge the losses.