I’ve been thinking about death

                  I’m feeling fine but I’m seventy-four and death is chugging closer, in days or decades isn’t my call. I’m hoping not to get to triple digits – rickety debility dangles few charms – but that opinion may change as I draw nearer.

                  Death may be our most distressing and least discussed concern. Conversation defaults to traffic, weather “the ball game,” anything but mortality. In my cocky twenties I enraged an aunt by assuring her that her sister, my mom, would one day die. “That’s a terrible thing to say!” she fumed.

                  We discuss death so little I’m not sure what I think about it. Talking (or writing, which is a form of talking) we talk things through, investigate, iterate, revise. Any serious conversation is, in T.S. Eliot’s words, “a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.” (The poet must have been having a really bad day when he wrote that.) My attitude toward our national calamity has gelled because we jabber about it incessantly. About death, not so much. Jane and I don’t shy from the topic it’s just, oy, let’s talk about something else.

                  Sixteen when Dad died, death affected me as awful beyond words. With macabre indulgence, I envisioned his coffined body, trapped and rotting. I blurted my first poem, sensing no other defense against my revulsion. I found myself repeating Dr. Donne’s fatuous defiance, “Death, thou shalt die!”

                  Busy, I mostly forgot death until it tapped me in my fifties. I privately rated my chances of surviving cancer at zero, while feigning optimism. Newly engaged to Jane, I felt tragically cheated, furious at an unjust deity in whom I did not believe.

                  At seventy-four I’m ambling in Death’s antechamber. Acquaintances vanish about one a week. Too many of my contemporaries are virtually dead, frittering the interval between today and extinction, “playing the back nine.” Hang me, I think, before I “hang it up,” but smile even so.

                  I no longer dread or resent death. Eternity is a penalty, no privilege: who could enjoy a play that never ends? The prospect of death’s long rest relaxes like a summer hammock. Why humans plague themselves with afterlife nonsense is beyond me.

                  When Death knocks, I’ll unlatch my door politely, grateful it tarried. I’ll regret missing stories, especially my grandkids’, but there are always more stories, and not all happy. What will rile me about Death’s arrival is all I’ll leave undone. My words! A massive heap of uttered words, in disarray, and the adorable lovelies I’ve yet to spout. Is this nuts or what? I’ve been gassing for sixty years – isn’t that enough!

                  Anticipating this divorce from my words crazes me. I’ve always loved to write but now I can’t write hard or fast enough. I have no goal, as Proust did, to complete some massive work – my ADD makes me a miniaturist, I fear – but simply to say more and better and more. One day without words sparks self-loathing, two days despair.

                  I concede the utter absurdity of this insistence. I know all the arguments, but they don’t help. Van Gogh painted seventy canvases in his last seventy days, no doubt sensing what was coming. Schubert, ravaged by syphilis, moaned he couldn’t die so full of songs. That’s the sort of desperation that rockets me out of sleep. However much time remains it’s not enough, nowhere near enough, to convey my appreciation and excitement and delight at having been. Death will relieve me from this insatiable longing but, hey, I’m too busy to die.