Countdown

Countdown:   I haven’t had much to say about my clock watch (or should that be my watch watch?) for quite a while now. Physically I’m about the same as I was two or three months ago. However, mentally I’m more and more concerned with my disconnection with friends and relatives. My relatives (other than my three children) all have their lives to live and don’t have time to keep up a regular correspondence with me. Nearly all of my friends here in Sun City West were friends from my golf groups or with those I worked with when I was a starter at one of our courses. Now that I’m no longer golfing, I’ve lost nearly all contact with them. Thus, my feelings of isolation and disconnection.

          In a recent Time magazine (Sept. 17, 2018), in an article by Jeffrey Kluger called “The Surprising Joy of Old Age,” he says better than I could what the end of life might contain: “If life wanted to mess with you, it couldn’t have come up with a better way than death. Especially the lead-up. Your strength flags; your world narrows; much of what once gave you pleasure and satisfaction is now gone. But as it turns out, happiness is still very much with you—often even more so than before.” I’m not sure I agree with the part about happiness. But I can agree with acceptance.

          He refers to The Happiness Curve, by Jonathan Rauch: “Life satisfaction appears to follow a U-shaped course, with its twin peaks in childhood, when the world is one great theme park, and in old age, when we’ve been on all the rides a thousand times and are perfectly content just to watch.”  (paraphrasing) In the middle years, 40s and 50s, when we should be feeling our happiest, life satisfaction bottoms out.

I can now see that my middle years were indeed tenser and less contented than when I was a child or in the years after I retired. I knew as a child that life was filled with possibility. I could do anything, become anyone. When I turned sixty, I had a new life in retirement, living in a golf paradise, and the world was good. But when I hit forty, I felt that all those plans for getting writing published or for actually learning how to play the piano or learn French were never going to happen; my life was less about the future and more about the past. These feelings only grew deeper when I hit fifty.

          And now, here I am, at that other peak on the U, into my eighties. Am I happy? No. Am I fearful of death? No. I’m just here marking time.

Kruger goes on to say, “Yes, death is nonnegotiable—something that can only be delayed, never avoided. It’s a mercy, then, that when we do reach the end, so many of us arrive there smarter, calmer and even smiling.” Okay, I’m smarter and calmer, but I’m still not smiling.