My father passed away just over a month ago. For a while before and a while since that day, I haven't had all that much to talk about. This regrouping time is natural, I suppose, but still weird to go through. I had been trying so hard to write regularly and keep momentum, but I was still disoriented by my lack of need to keep going. Now, however, I think I'm back to blather on about whatever's on my mind.
I did write down a few things about my dad, and I'll get to those in time, but I think the first thing I want to talk about on my return to the page is something I'd actually been thinking about for a while, and with this new sort of perspective that I have, I think I can now make enough sense of it to share.
It sort of came around through watching my dad go through his final phases. His passing was in no means sudden or unexpected, and I suppose it was as peaceful as we could have hoped for. But it made me think about the course of his life -- first off, he dealt with multiple sclerosis his entire adulthood. When he was first diagnosed in his twenties, he and my mom were afraid that what they were facing was a death sentence. That didn't turn out to be the case, but the disease did gradually wear away at his physical and mental capabilities over the following decades.
Eventually, medical science found something that seemed to help slow the disease's progress, but it also might have made him more susceptible to the type of lymphoma that he was diagnosed with early this summer. At the same time, other relatives of his generation are growing older and more infirm, and it leaves me looking around, and wondering what the point of old age really is.
Is it really supposed to be like this, this slow accumulation of aches and pains and breakdowns, until there's really nothing else to talk or think about other than the imperfect workings of your own body? What kind of purpose does that serve? And if there's no purpose to it, then what does that fact in itself mean? Whether you believe in a higher power or not, does this eventual inward-turning of the psyche make sense?
Similarly, for a while now I've been trying out ways to articulate something about my new perspective of being in middle age -- which, by any measure, I pretty much have to admit I am now -- and how it compares to the one I had when I was younger.
Young people, at first look, seem to be the ones who are really experiencing the world. They're out there every day, drinking in the newest thing that's come over the horizon. They're socializing, going places, doing things. They have their hands and feet in the stuff of Today. Nothing escapes their insatiable need for the New. Their biggest complaint to the older generation is "You don't know what's going on Right Now! You're living in the past!"
But what I think they fail to see -- I know I definitely failed to see it when I was younger -- is that older people see everything new through a lens that's informed by what's already happened in the last few decades. While the young think they're living in a bright spotlight of NOW and that's all that matters, those of us who have been around longer are equally aware of everything that's outside that spotlight. We've lived through what came before, and learned more about the context of the modern world than they hope to can comprehend, at least not until they've learned that there's more to the world than just what's going on at the moment.
And I'm not just saying that because I'm prejudiced toward the world that I've lived through... there's more to it than that. If you're doing it right, your own storehouse of human knowledge and history keeps expanding in all directions, all throughout your life. But what I didn't realize when I was younger -- and which I think younger people *shouldn't* know -- is that your world is so small without that understanding.
Again, I say that younger people *shouldn't* have this perspective, that what they know is merely a small fraction of what the world is really about. If they did, they would be so humbled and bewildered by it all that they would never do anything, never blaze any trails because they'd already know that there are well-established ones that they could much more easily stick to. The only reason I even state this fact here is that, even if they read it, they'll never believe that it's true.
So, I've now got a better understanding of the world and how it works, what's come before. I know that's it's a much more inclusive, less insulated, and altogether more *right* than the way I thought when I was younger. And then I look at what I said before, about how old age can make us turn inward, necessarily make us obsess about our own thoughts and bodies. And I have to ask myself... who's to say that I'm not just standing in the brighter center of an even bigger spotlight, still unaware of things that it would be impossible for me to be aware of until I go through them?
The strange thing is that, while writing this, I just might have answered my own original question. I was asking, back at the beginning of this, what the purpose of all this end-of-life suffering could possibly be for. And perhaps I stumbled across it while thinking this through. Maybe the answer is this -- every day is a gift.
Let me back up such a thudding cliché with a little explanation. And mayhap you'll get a little view into how I view the world in the process... Everything breaks down. It's the nature of the Universe, the second law of thermodynamics. The instant any living thing stops actively trying to prevent itself from decaying, it falls apart. We don't think about it much, but we're assaulted from all sides by other living things that are trying to destroy us every day. They're incredibly tiny, but if our bodies don't repel their advances, then we're finished. It's a battle that happens every day.
Today, we've been able to use our collective gray matter to help our bodies fight this fight. Medicine and an understanding of how the enemy works has brought us to the point where the ultimate breakdown of the body tends to comes from its own internal structure. More and more, we're living long enough that it's the faults in our own DNA that are causing our ultimate downfall. Because the longer we live, the more likely we are to develop cancer, dementia, and all the other fatal illnesses that naturally grow more likely over time.
So maybe, when you're old and reflecting back on things, dealing with the everyday aches and pains and doctor visits, it's to give you a perspective on how glorious life is, even when you're no longer your young, healthy self. Maybe it's a transition from living a physically-based life to living a mentally-based one. The bill finally comes due on the wonders of the life you've been given, whether they've been big or small. It's the preservation of balance.
Maybe that's the lesson that will come nearer to the end of life... and I say that knowing that I can't (and probably shouldn't) fully appreciate it. Maybe all those around us who seem old and infirm know things that we younger folks just can't grasp yet.
And, of course, if they were to tell us, we wouldn't listen.
No comments:
Post a Comment