Living in the Epilogue

I dream:

I sit down at a big round table, with a group of people at a café filled with large tropical plants and southern light. I am seated to the right of Fr. Richard Rohr.

He turns to me and tells me, quietly, just between us as the others settle in their seats, that he has read Circling the Drain the e-book of essays that I collected primarily for use in my mortality workshop. He says he thinks it is quite good, and that I should add a few more essays to it. He says he thinks it would be very helpful for the elderly.

I tell him it is strange, that getting an unpredictable cancer in my early fifties, while my children were still young, feels like it forced me to skip over a couple of stages of normal adult development and that this often makes me feel insecure – like I leapt into elderhood without experiencing middle age – and that I often feel inadequate somehow. I tell him that I must have missed out on some normative maturational stages and phases that others are moving through in real time – depositing me in a position that I haven’t exactly earned over time, and that I can’t really explain to others.

Fr. Rohr replies: “Many older people don’t think about such things at all, they completely reject the idea of elderhood and are all ridiculously busy trying to stay young!  I think your writing could be helpful. Maybe that is why you skipped over those life-chapters!”

I often don’t know what to do with how old I feel at fifty-eight – and I know that to people who are truly my elders, I sound like a grandiose youth. The way that twenty-eight-year-olds sound to forty-year-olds, or forty-year-olds sound to sixty-year-olds.

It is even stranger when I encounter older people who feel like they are younger than I am. In Santa Fe there are many aggressively fit and youthful retirees, and many older people committed to staying forever young, who pride themselves on their vitality well into advanced age. Many embrace the magic diets, supplements, and lifestyles that celebrate longevity as an explicit goal and value, extending out the sweet center of living as far toward the outer edges as possible.

I do not know how to chat with such folk. I am living psychologically closer to dying than they are, and longevity does not seem to me to contain any inherent virtue.  I was forced to give up on the notion that I had any control over how I would age, or if I would age at all.

I don’t know how to talk to seventy-eight-year-olds who are confidently planning to live into their nineties in maximum comfort. I’ve already failed at their desired goal, and feel extraordinarily lucky, blessed, surprised that I have already been permitted to live until fifty-eight.

I cross with the cross walk, buckle up in the car, eat a largely plant-based diet, wear a mask in indoor public spaces and get an hour or two, give or take, of exercise every day. But I do that to respect the gift I have been given, this extension that I was granted, and not because I believe that I have any real control over how long or how painlessly I will be permitted to live.  

That is up to fate, to a thousand different natural, and maybe even supernatural forces that are all more powerful than I am.

I’ve already had six years more than I expected and living to see my children reach adulthood was more than I dared to hope for just a few years ago.  The grandiose illusion that I was the primary author of my own story was permanently ruptured, and I am not sure how to connect to anyone who still lives confidently inside that fragile bubble.

I am living in the epilogue, the afterward, the “where are they now” update after the story I wrote and edited was brought to an abrupt close.

Is this a kind of maturity? Or passivity? Or defeatism?

Some weird drama, some secondary gain that I have over-attached to because of a traumatic diagnosis?

Or maybe it is a kind of humility, or faith?

 I have no idea.

I know many people who survive circumstances not so different from mine that return to normalcy the first chance they get, that return to the story that their destiny is largely in their control.

Me? I have thrown my hands up in the air, deciding that our culturally privileged stories of control were just a gimmick to soothe and divert me while I lived immersed in a reality so complex, multi-layered, and interdependent that what would happen next was always largely beyond my preferences or desires.

Maybe there is some wild liberation in feeling the wind blow through my fingers as I holler out: “Look Ma! No hands!!”  Maybe my surrender to larger forces is its own kind of recklessness and returning to the belief that I largely control the outcome and quality of my life based on my efforts and intentions is the more prudent choice.

I remember once asking our veterinarian what the optimal diet was to assure the kitten we had just taken home would live to a ripe old age: “The oldest cat I ever knew lived to be twenty-two years old and ate nothing but fried chicken and Yoo-Hoo, so I have no idea what to tell you…” he replied.

Less than half of cancers are connected to lifestyle, diet, smoking, alcohol use – the other fifty-plus percent are luck, genetics or who the fuck knows, yet most people believe that a “clean” lifestyle is a bullet-proof shield against fates like mine.

We have fates, preferred, or feared, that we can only do so much to subvert. Much more of life (and death) happens to us that we care to admit.

Here is a choice I have made: I choose to embrace and integrate and reorganize around the fateful events that seem to happen repeatedly through my life. I accept that fate will humble me.

This makes me feel “old” whatever that means. The surrender. The acceptance. The lack of ambition or striving. The suspiciousness I have about the impulses that try to seduce me into overcoming rather than sinking down and accepting and moving under and through.

My future goals are minimal:

·      To be of use to my children and community for as long as I am permitted.

·      To read as many books as I can.

I don’t know if imaginal Fr. Rohr is right about how or why, but something got skipped over or stripped away. My age mates and many of my elders still see themselves as building toward something, as authors of a story that is only half-way, or at best, three-quarters finished.

I see myself as living in the ending, in an epilogue of unknown duration, plotted and edited by a conglomeration of forces, all much larger than myself, who might, if I am lucky, acknowledge me for the small but valuable contribution I made to the trajectory of the narrative I am living.

I’m not saying I think my death is imminent.  I’m saying that the story I thought I was authoring is done and the epilogue isn’t up to me.

Maybe it will be:

“And then she gave it all up, and spent the rest of her long and healthy life knitting little doggie sweaters and running a chihuahua rescue on ten acres in South Dakota”

Or

“Shortly afterward she contracted Covid which depleted her precarious immune system and reactivated her previously dormant cancer. She lived five more years on debilitating chemotherapy before foregoing treatment and securing a medically assisted death.”

Or perhaps an unexpected turn:

“When her children had grown and established their own lives, she and her husband spent the next eight years exploring South America in a renovated RV before their unexpected death in a head on collision.”

Or maybe this:

“Martha continued to do whatever she could think of to support her family and community, in the exact same spot, for another twenty-five years- with some failures, some successes, some hard times, some peaceful years – never taking a single day of the additional time she had been given for granted.”