The night is black

One of the good things about aging is the privilege of seeing how it all turns out. Whenever a friend or close acquaintance dies, which is something that happens all too frequently these years, I can’t help thinking about all the subsequent events they didn’t witness.

∑ A big baseball fan, he never got to know the Tigers finally made it to the World Series again!

∑ A progressive activist all her life, she didn’t get to witness the great Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006.

∑ A leader in the fight for AIDS awareness, he never got to see the day where it became a chronic illness instead of a sure killer.

∑ A loyal son and brother, the youngest in his family, he left this world before his Mom, Dad, or brothers did.

∑ A loving mother, she never got to see how well her parents turned out.

∑ A wonderful teacher and a father, he died long before he discovered what effect he had on his young students and his own children.

∑ The love of her life, he didn’t get to know how she accommodated herself to another man, a kind man, and raised a family, but she never stopped dreaming of him.

∑ A caring Mom, she departed thinking her son was married for life; she never knew what subsequently occurred.

∑ A strange, drug-filled man, with a penchant for meeting women for sex on the Internet, he died in a motorcycle crash on Halloween, after breaking up with the one true love of his life.

∑ A sweet, creative, inventive man, he ended his own life before witnessing his lovely son’s emergence as a talented young man. In a moment of depression, he made a very serious mistake. (Ban all guns!)

∑ A gentle grandfather, he died the night before he was going to meet his youngest and last granddaughter, his fourteenth grandchild. He only ever met 13.

∑ An activist songwriter and performer, he killed himself when the world as he perceived it had rejected his message, only to miss the time when a new generation arrived who would have celebrated it.


I suppose that is enough to make my point. Like comes & goes at an unexpected rate. Even if you are the beneficiary of good genes and try to take care of yourself, time will catch up with you.

Is there some secret truth about all of this?

No.

If you are still breathing, and over 50, it may be time to take an extra deep breath and contemplate what your life has meant. Have you done what you wanted to do? If you had to add it all up, could you find some meaning in your time here on earth? What do you hope people who survive you remember about you?

These are essential questions. I would argue that they are as basic as anything people search for in religion. Our spiritual existences consist of the sum total of all the good and bad, secret and open, mistaken and accurate, kind and mean, internal and external actions we have ever taken during our physical time here as organisms on earth.

I’m sorry. This is not easy stuff to deal with, but I never promised this would be easy.

Who are you? Who am I? What else could we do, together or apart?

These are not academic questions. These are among the unfinished matters that allow us, even at advanced ages, to know that we truly are still here.

There are those who are walking dead among us or so frozen in time they might as well be gone. But not you and not me. Not if you are reading these words. There is still time for us. It may be a short period or it may be long. Either way, if my words can reach you, please commit yourself to live every moment as if it may be your last.

Because your last moment will arrive, as will mine, maybe tomorrow, maybe a long time from now.

Our stories will thus end, according to the natural order. It's up to the survivors to carry this on...

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