Much Is Taken, Much Remains
For several years now we’ve been getting together with these two other couples for dinner on a regular basis. We alternate between the three homes every few weeks and have even given ourselves the name Traveling Wise Asses. We were all going to break bread last night but it was cancelled because the mother of one of our women friends in the group passed away, requiring our friend to travel and be with her dad and take care of business. The loss of her mom reduced to two the number of parents still living among the six of us. My own mom who is ninety two and that same friend whose dad is still alive.
Parents die all the time, at all ages, and there’s nothing unique about losing one. Yet it does bump you up against thoughts of mortality, especially the older you get. It is clear that with advancing years the chances of having one or both parents still around are considerably diminished. Granted, there’s nothing more boring than a certain kind of conversation about health and well-being and mortality. It’s completely a cliché to imagine aging Baby Boomers talking about their prostates or colonoscopies or increasing aches and pains due to arthritis.
It’s as tedious as comparing eras. Those of us who grew up in the sixties sometimes do love talking about how great rock music was then and Woodstock and where we were when JFK was shot and growing up during Vietnam and watching the body bags and spewing nonsense about the good old days. It’s like a really boring way to talk about the weather, when it is used as a conversation filler. “Hot enough for ya’?” or “Nice one today.” It’s no different really than someone asking “How are you?” or ” ‘Sup, man?” a question I hardly ever answer, because none usually is expected.
It’s also a chance to dig a little deeper together, beneath the banalities, and maybe even appreciate what one still has. Tennyson wrote of aging, “Tho’ much is taken, much abides.” What makes talk about health or weather boring is when it becomes complaining. There’s also a kind of storytelling that has an unremittingly tedious quality because there is never any resolution. Just the same narrative over and over again. I was doubtless guilty of this in 2004 when I had to keep talking about my brush with mortality over and over and over again until I didn’t have to anymore. I got through my PTSD about it eventually, but I’m sure I talked about it until people were just tired of hearing it.
I take umbrage a bit at the implication that older people talk about this too much. Because shit does happen like parents dying or getting prostate cancer or having your hearing diminish or having your bladder not work quite so well or not being able to read labels without your glasses or being more careful of falling or having more stains on your underwear. What wears thin is really just the complaining and forgetting about what we do have.
I remember something the poet Nikki Giovanni said that has been really important to me. She’s a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech and has written a boatload of wonderful words. In an interview I read a few years ago, she said (not verbatim) essentially “I’m tired of hearing all the pissing and moaning about getting older. I love being in my sixties. There are things I can do now that I never could have done when I was younger.”
