When I was a exceedingly young fellow (teens and twenties), I suffered from a great fear of death. It was not obsessive or constant, but enough to keep me lying awake at night, sometimes in a sweaty panic. It was not a fear of death itself, nor a concern about anguish in an afterlife -- hell a story which I always regarded as a pathetic fiction and fraud. No, my fear was that I would miss out on things. Children, grandchildren, springtimes, love, baseball, mountains, travel, books, knowledge, corn and hamburgers in August, the works. I wanted to live to an old age for the experiences. I well remember that in the 1960s, when I was barely out of adolescence, I would project myself forward to the distant future, as far as to the year 2000, the new millennium. I remember thinking, if I can just make it to 2000, when I'll be sixty-one, I'll have lived a full life. I'll be ready to go.
Well, 2000 has long ago come and gone, and here I am, pushing eighty, and in excellent, almost miraculous health. Such good health, in fact, that on good days I climb our neighboring foothills like a gazelle. (On bad days, even walking downhill seems as though I'm slogging through a swamp of mucilage, but that's another matter.)
I no longer fear death. No matter what else happens to me, I'm not going to die young, with my promises, such as they were, unfulfilled.
But the fear of dying young has been superseded by a new fear -- the fear of living too long. When did the transition occur?
I don't want to outlive my time. I don't want to outlive my friends, my family, my health. I'm already the senior member, the patriarch, of my extended family -- not just the direct line from my grandparents, but of the extended cousinhood. In my family, there are no elders and only a couple of near-coevals. I don't want to become an isolate. Even more so, I don't want to lose my mobility or my mind. I don't want to find myself in a nursing home, pee on my pants, bedridden, "locked-in". And I'm going to do everything I can to avoid allowing myself to get into that situation. I've seen people in that trap at close hand too many times -- and it ain't pretty.
Meanwhile, I'm enjoying the perspective of the moment. I'm glad that I managed to get to this point. From where I stand, I can remember my grandparents and I know my grandchildren. I'm at the midpoint, the apex, of five generations. I marvel at the changes -- recall, will you, that my grandfather was born in darkest Ukraine in 1863, my youngest grandchildren were born in hi-tech Boulder, Colorado in 2013. Need I say more?
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