How to Get Old (not so gracefully)

Fair warning – I’m in the process of “aging out of life”, also known as getting old, which means I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about getting old. It’s tough to reconcile, since I don’t feel old, I just feel normal. The way I look at it, if I don’t feel old or act old, then I’m not old. I ignore aging; that works pretty well, actually.

Ignorance may be bliss, but reminders that one is becoming an elder can show up unexpectedly to rattle that bliss. I was engaged in a conversation about a project I’m working on, and it was mentioned that a part of it wouldn’t be viable for a year or more. Nonchalantly, no big deal, right? I immediately thought, hey there, I don’t have a lot of years left. I also thought we should probably ramp things up a bit, so now I have an annoying timeline running in my mind. I wouldn’t say it’s exactly a Doomsday Clock, but you get the picture.

There is more to getting old than physically aging, of course – it’s the “D” word. It’s realizing that your personal calendar has a last page, that you have a shelf-life; you literally have an estimated end-of-life date. Before we realize concretely that we’re getting old, we can do a pretty good job of ignoring the looming end state of life. As far as we know, all human bodies die at some point. My favorite quote regarding death was in a conversation between Pippin and Gandalf, at the Siege of Gondor:

GANDALF: “… No, the journey doesn’t end here. Death is just another path, one that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it. … White shores, and beyond, a far green country under a swift sunrise.”

It’s ironic that as I’m becoming older, people seem more willing to listen to what I have to say. I guess I’m catching up on gravitas or something, or maybe (more likely) they’re just being polite. Whatever. I know that what I say gets lodged somewhere in their mind and will come to them in time when they’re doing their own reflections about aging. When that happens, I recommend Dylan Thomas:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light”.

I’m pretty sure I’ve never been described as gentle.