So I turned 42 today. It feels like I’m getting into the groove of this being over forty thing. Actually turning forty seemed like a novelty. Forty-one was just more of the same. But forty-two? I can see the pattern now.
There’s something so cocky about calling this “middle age,” as if the universe owed me a good forty more years. But they didn’t call it “The Thirty Years War” until the war was over. They didn’t finish year fifteen and say, “Well, we’re half done now.” Things end when they end and you don’t know when. One of our girls got her front teeth slightly loosened on a festival ride the other day and had to go get a late night X-ray. (She’s fine.) When her sister found out that she had to go to bed while her sister got to stay up late having fun at the dentist’s office, she said, “That’s not fair.” I laughed and said, “I don’t think that’s what that word means.” But I guess I’d feel a similarly misplaced sense of injustice if I discovered that I was closer to the end of my stay here on earth than to the middle. Maybe that’s a bad attitude. Back when he was only mildly insufferable, way back when he co-hosted ESPN’s “The Big Show” with Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann had a standard line when he had to report that a slightly injured baseball player was listed as “day-to-day”: “We’re all day-to-day.” So we are. Might as well face it.
I don’t honestly remember the event, but my first conscious experience of mortality must have been when my Great Grandfather Burt Thurman (“Mr. Burt”) decided he wanted to ride his horse one more time and got thrown. He lasted a little while in the hospital but the fall basically killed him. The whole family had been watching his ride, including me, just three years old. As they were getting ready to drive him to the hospital, I took it upon myself to cheer him up by saying, “Mr. Burt, a lot of people think it’s awfully funny, an old man like you falling off a horse.” They told me he laughed about it later, but he wasn’t very happy at the time. I like to think that I was just trying to give him a little perspective.
About three years later I received my second exposure to death. Mom and I came home from school on a hot early June day and found our sheep dog Morton had strangled himself trying to get to his water. Mom ran inside. At the time I thought she was upset, but now I’m pretty sure she was running to call for help. In any case, the screen door slammed behind her and stuck, so I couldn’t get in. I had to stand there for what seemed like a long time right beside my dead dog. I didn’t like that.
But while I’m sad that Morton died so painfully and that Mr. Burt got hurt falling off his horse, I appreciate a little better now why we all have to move on. There’s a time to bloom and grow and a time to decay and fade, to make room for the next season’s blooms. I do like to imagine that every day in every way I’m getting better and better, but there’s increasing evidence that it isn’t so. If I’m improving at anything, it’s accepting that the roller coaster doesn’t only go up, and that most of the fun is in the coming down. So, as much as my planning counts for – which might not be much – I plan to be around for a lot more of this ride. But I may have already passed the peak. And that’s alright. Do not rage against the dimming of the light. Go gently in, and then sleep tight.
