I’m Still Working Out the Details

So, which is it?  Rage against the dying of the light or serenity in the face of the inevitable and natural cycle of life and death?  I was at a funeral and I looked at my cousins and saw what time was doing to them.  All of us were proof of the inevitability of aging and death.  Each one was a slightly different take on mortality.  Some seemed to be aging gently and they exuded humor and calm.  Others looked very tired and deeply saddened by how hard the way is.  Well, that difference comes of a combination of internal and external factors.  Luck plays a part and also wisdom and also temperament.  If I’m going to guess I’d say luck and temperament play the largest parts.  I mean I guess someone like Gautama could remain tranquil in the face of fate’s onslaught against our loved ones and our selves but most people are not so stoic.  We need some luck to keep us going.  Even Job finally had enough and wanted a word with the Big Guy Upstairs about all those boils.

So, is there a correct attitude toward the Big Sleep?  I’ve always taken a somewhat legalistic attitude about what kind of deal we get from fate.  When I was a bit younger, I used to say that fifty years was somewhat the break even point.  What I meant by that was if fate gave you fifty good years you should think that you got a decent deal.  Not great but decent.  The first fifty years are the best part of a life and with any reasonable amount of effort you can get quite a bit done in a half century.  You can raise a family.  You can become an expert in your profession.  You could even have served as President of the United States by then.

It’s not really a full lifetime but if you don’t lollygag around until forty you can cram a lot of living into fifty years.  So, if you live comfortably to seventy, I think you can feel like you got a pretty sweet deal.  I’m approaching the biblical “three score and ten” mark myself.  And even though I’m not anxious to throw in the towel quite yet I can’t see myself going through the whole wailing, gnashing my teeth and shaking my fist at heaven act.  I feel it would reflect a certain amount of ingratitude.  After all, think of kids who die of cancer or some other terrible disease before they ever get their permanent teeth.  That’s where I see someone lodging a legitimate grievance against the way the universe is run.  I’ve always been repelled by the suffering of the innocents; “the problem of pain.”

So that’s my somewhat simplistic but easily explainable philosophy of life and death.  God owes us fifty good years.  And we owe it to ourselves (and Him) to use the time wisely and diligently.  And this is coming from a profoundly lazy man.  No male in my family has ever truly grown up before thirty.  We have a talent for floating above the ground for an inordinate amount of time before being forced to finally settle down and get to work.  For this reason, I feel like I have been blessed in having reached my age with all of the milestones accomplished.  Of course, all of the credit for this goes to Camera Girl.  She refused to let me stall her plans and so she had her kids while we were very young.  Which means we were desperately poor for the first ten plus years of our married lives.  Which means I was that much luckier to get the whole thing to work out.

So, seeing death and dying is a humbling experience.  But it also makes me grateful for what I’ve already been allotted.  And honestly, I’m not very excited about ending up a nonagenarian or even an octogenarian.  I’m hoping for some very lazy death.  I’ve toyed with the idea of starving myself.  But I’m afraid I might keep putting it off every time I smell something good on the stove.  I’m still working out the details.