Courage in Face of the Inevitable Journey
As I prepared to leave the post office, I could see that an older man was coming through the door and would cross my path. I waited for him to enter.
As he stepped in, he seemed to be a man I knew from the gym. I had not seen him in a while, and for a moment, I doubted this man was who I thought him to be, but when he greeted me, I recognized his voice.
I looked him in the face. He looked older, less vigorous, than when I had seen him last. Had he been sick? There was a grayness to his skin, a certain pallor or perhaps it was transparency.
I resisted staring, but frankly, I was a bit shocked.
“I have not seen you at the gym for a while,” I commented, to begin a conversation on a topic that we could both connect to quickly and easily.
“I took the summer off,” he answered. It was now November. Summer had been over for two months — if not three here in Maine. For a moment, I thought, This sounds more like “giving up” than “taking time off.”
(I had just read a story of a 72-year-old athlete who had given herself permission to turn her mile swim into a half-mile swim — but she had not “taken time off.”.)
We chatted a bit — about the season’s first snow which was predicted for that night and about a bit of politics. Then, we parted. Our relationship was not, after all, deep.
Old age was staring me in the face
As I drove away — incidentally to the gym, my thoughts were caught up with this man. Not because I was particularly attached to him, but because he was a harbinger of life to come. He is perhaps five or six years older than I, and my clear realization — as much as I don’t want to have a clear realization like this of a man who is only slightly older than I— was that he has entered into another phase of growing older, a phase that I am not at yet.
I have read that your 60s are the youth of old age, your 70s are the middle-age of old age, and your 80s and beyond are the old age of old age.
“This man,” I alerted myself with a certain apprehension, “is leaving the middle years of his old age and entering his end stage.”
A Sobering thought
This, of course, was not an academic thought, not an observation of a gerontologist, not a detached rumination without connection to my lived life. This man is at the next step at which I, too, will likely be in a few years. This realization is sobering.
I like to think of myself as a man of courage, and I believe that I am. I have faced a number of difficulties in my life — as anyone who has lived to be 72 has. Most difficult, by far, was the death of my wife, Martha, in 2008.
“I want you to grieve me for a while and then I hope you will move on,” she had said to me the day before she died. (When you love someone, you give them permission to move on!)
Her loss was devastating, but I survived — one day at time, sometimes one minute at a time.There were many moments — especially in the first year — when I thought I wouldn’t be able to move on, when I didn’t want to move on because grief gave me a link to her, but in time I did began to understand I could only choose to live or to die and so I began to recreate my life without her.
(Life without your spouse, said my widow friend, becomes like a donut. There’s a lot of delicious stuff on the outer circle, but there’s a hole in the center.)
In addition to this huge loss, there were the inevitable deaths of parents and friends and the equally inevitable deaths of dreams and hopes to remind me how life is made up of giving up.
Every giving up entails a refashioning of identity — a death of an old self and the birth of a new, a call to recreate.
Each giving up is a rehearsal
I have gone to the gym for years. It is not something that I particularly need to motivate myself to do. I just love the experience of lifting. Over the years, however, I have had to delete certain exercises from my protocol.
I gave up squats. Squats are a great overall compound exercise. They develop many muscle groups at one time, but they had become too stressful for my knees. After squatting, I was not comfortable.
I gave squatting up for the greater good of saving my knees for the future, but I do see other men in the gym squatting and sometimes I wish my situation were not what it is.
But, it is what it is.
There have been other exercises that I have had to let go of also. Jogging, for instance. For me, this has been an experience of “the reality principle.” I am not a man to deny reality.
And this giving up now is a rehearsal for the great giving up I will have to do one day — which we must all do.
Not my mother’s son for nothing
Acknowledging reality is a quality which I shared with my mother who was always very practical and realistic about her life.
When it came time for her to give up driving at 90, she called my brother-in-law who lived near her and said, “John, I’m ready to sell my car. Can you do it for me?”
And that was it! She gave up driving.
When we had spoken to her earlier about whether she should still be driving, she told us, with no uncertainty, that she felt safe on the road and then she added, “When I need to get my license up, I will do it.”
We knew she would. That’s the way she was. We did not have to worry about her not doing what needed to be done. (She made her aging so much easier for us to help her with!)
My mother-in-law, on the other hand, had to be confronted several times. My kids began to refuse to drive with her, saying “I’d rather miss out on going someplace than be with Grandma on the road.”
One day, my wife took my mother-in-law’s keys from their accustomed hook and said, “Do you need to crash into a young mother with her kids in the back seat? Do you need to kill someone like Uncle Clarkie did?” (“Uncle Clarkie” was a reference to my mother-in-law’s truck driver brother-in-law who had a heart attack while driving a semi and crashed into a car in the on-coming lane, killing himself and five teenagers. For the rest of her life, his wife lamented, “If he was going to die, why couldn’t he die alone? Why did he take those kids with him?”)
Bringing Uncle Clarkie and the young mother into the scene was playing hard ball on my wife’s part, but it may have saved the lives of innocent people.
Playing hard ball was the only way to get my mother-in-law to give up driving. It is not easy to give anything up that we love.
The future is staring me in the face
So as I continue thinking about my gym acquaintance, I am fully aware that my future will call for giving up so many things that I now enjoy.
Squats (which I have already done), driving, life itself.
My courageous mother told me how, in her late 70s, she had realized she could do only one thing a day: either go shopping in the afternoon or go play cards “with the girls” in the evening. She understood that she could not do both without exhausting herself for the next day. Then, she continued, in her 80s, she had realized she could either go shopping one day or play cards “with the girls” the next day, but she could not do both of them on consecutive days. Doing something every day had become too tiring; she needed rest days in between activities.
As she approached her 90s, my mother began to use the telephone more and more as her social outlet—she was an extrovert. She kept up with her family and friends but no longer could go out as much to visit with them. Then, of course, came her decision to give up driving, and visiting her family and friends under her own power was no longer possible.
When it came time to die, she told us, “I am not afraid to die. I just don’t want to die alone.”
Fat chance of that happening. We were eleven — children, spouses, grandchildren — surrounding her bed as she faded away, slowly giving up her spirit.
The mother I had known for 68 years went peacefully.
The life in your years
Of course, I believe in the saying that “it is not the years in your life that matter but the life in your years.”
But, I would have to be totally lacking in discernment not to understand that the “life in my years” will increasingly be curtailed by considerable giving up.
How will I live these years out? In my mind, these years extend at least another 15 to 20. But, do they?
Of course, I don’t know how long they will be. I do think, however, that I will be able to face the reality of whatever the coming years bring. I do think I will face this time — and the inevitable — with courage.My model
When Martha was dying, I asked her — about a month before she did die — if she was afraid. She said she had been, but now she was confident her body knew how to die.
“When I had my babies — especially our first, I was a bit scared of the process, but then I told myself that billions of women had had babies and a woman’s body knows how to have babies. I needed to get out of the way and let my body do the birthing. I have to do the same thing now: get out of the way of the process my body is engaged in. I need to let it die. It knows how.”
I watched her die in great awe of her courage.
I hope to muster the same courage — and I believe I am a man of courage — when my time comes.
Along the way of this final journey, I am sure life will give me many opportunities to practice courage.
Courage — and choosing life until the end — is the only viable option — isn’t it?
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If you liked this story, you will enjoy Destiny and Fate: Why These Belong at the Center of Your Memoir and Your Life is the Story of Your Myth.
