My friends are dying left and right.
The metaphor must derive from military maneuvers, where pals on either hand go kerplop under enemy fire. Now (to switch metaphors like horses) is the fall of my brigade. Labor Day we shivered at winter’s tang, that first detachment from branches, so unexpected yet predictable. Post-frost, the leaves flurry down like snowflakes – left and right. Come December, the branches are bare and there are no leaves left, except the occasional gnarled centenarian, precariously clinging.
From adolescence until retirement, we ask, “Who died this year?” -- under peacetime conditions. Now the question becomes, “Who died this week?” I open the obits expecting familiars. Less than rue deaths, I rejoice in my escape. Not yet!
Younger I anticipated sadness at so much mortality. How lonely old age, such a leaden cope of regret! There’s some of that, surely, waking astonished that the actors vivid in one’s dreams have long since turned dust. But how can we lament what’s natural, necessary, inevitable? That is Hamlet’s lesson from his invigorating crisis: “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow,” he consoles his bestie, Laertes. “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all.” If I re-sound these sentences regularly, it’s because they resound within me. Nowhere is resignation more serenely summarized – and Shakespeare was just thirty-five.
One explanation of our national grumpiness, especially among oldsters, is boredom. Many, sadly, run out of things to do. After decades of busyness, they’re flummoxed when business no longer summons. They watch TV. They “get together” with folks they’d have disparaged in younger years. They clutter their calendars with events. Maybe they take up a hobby or learn Mah-Jong. (What is Mah-Jong anyway? – have to look it up.) Time (hideous likeness) “hangs heavy,” therefore something must be amiss. They vote for a reckless anarchist to “fix things,” because what the hell, they haven’t much time left anyway: “Après nous le deluge.” The captious irresponsibility of so many comfortable oldsters gets my goat, how they clutch their net worth as if it were worth and not a net.
I (unexpectedly) find the ubiquity of death bracing. Never have I felt more tinglingly alive. Another day spared, who has time to mope! I do not deserve these bonus years – I did not expect them – they’re my jackpot, which I must spend immediately, wisely, lest I perish with a full purse. Writing and loving are what I do so I do them as hotly as I can. Reminiscence, nostalgia, sighing waste zest, so to hell with them! I ignore the casualties to my left and right: my time will come soon enough.
Homer’s Greeks must have felt this way, no time to bellyache. Scholars figure Achilles was thirty when he met his fate, others say half that. With only fifteen years to secure your immortal renown, you’d better stay focused. Age fifteen – even thirty – I was still dithering, awaiting my vocation. Having dawdled most of my race, I must pick up the pace at its close. I wake panting, pursued.
What does it mean, to have “lived one’s life”? As the notorious judge said of porn, “You know it when you see it.” Completion is an emotion not a certification: you know when you have given your chance all you’ve got, your best shot.
(P.S. The phrase “left and right” derives not from warfare, but the seating of the National Assembly during the French Revolution. The things we learn!)