I’ve written before about
this image I have of life as a people mover, a moving sidewalk of sorts. We all
get on at birth and ride along until our turn comes to rotate off the end. I
find this image helpful because it reminds me that there are people coming
along behind my cohort, folks who are now in the early stages of finding their
place in the world, folks who are at the peak of their adult lives, and folks
slowly moving along in various ways toward the step-off moment. It puts my life
in perspective as part of an ongoing flow that includes, but isn’t centered on,
me. But this simple image misses an important reality: not everyone travels
smoothly to the end of the ride. There are no guardrails on the people mover.
People can—and some do—slip off along the way.
Recently, I’ve been reminded
of this truth by a series of illnesses and deaths among people I know, mostly
people around my age. I’m also reminded of it when I hear stories of people who
die much younger than I am of illnesses, accidents, homicide, suicides. People
frequently step off the people mover not at the end, but sideways, because there
are no guardrails.
I’m tempted to wrap all such
endings in language like “they died too soon.” And for those who know and love
these people (and usually for the people who pass), that seems self-evidently
true. From our pained, grieving perspective, it is unquestionably too soon.
Still, from the perspective of life’s inevitable trajectory, indifferent as
that may be to our feelings, no time is correct or wrong. The end can come at
any time.
It can happen to any of us,
any day, expected or not.
It seems that as we age, my
friends and I are more and more aware of this uncertain certainty, more prone
to acknowledging it. “It could be any of us,” we say. Tomorrow. Today. “You
never know.” That’s always been true, of course. From its beginning, life’s
continuation was always uncertain. But with age, the increasing proximity of life’s
inevitable end surely makes us more keenly aware of its tentative, contingent quality.
And then periods like this happen, and the message seems to be everywhere.
On one level, these recent,
personal reminders of the absent guardrails serve as alerts, insisting that I
not take living for granted, that I appreciate each day I have here, because those
days are numbered. For all of us. And we don’t know what the number is.
And on another level, it
strikes me that what we’re wrestling with, what we’re trying to get a handle on
is so much more poignant. It’s the fact that, to mix metaphors, our image of
life as a continuous path leading off into some obscure sunset is flawed. The
banks on either side of the path may be steep and unstable, and it is really,
actually, painfully, inescapably true that none of us knows when we might slide
off. Truly grasping this reality is a tough task, at least for me. I only
sometimes “get it.” Usually, I just mutter the right things about “any of us,
any day” without fully grasping the fragility of my position on this planet.
It’s a protective thing, I’m sure. But sometimes, when these experiences with illness
and death pile up—which they increasingly do as we age—I feel the futility of
the defense.
At those moments, I really
need to talk to someone else who genuinely gets it. Sometimes I need to cry at
the loss and the fear and the stark reality of it. And then I need to look
around my life and be grateful for another day—or another moment—to cherish my
time here. To appreciate the ride while I’m still on it.
I suppose to some folks, this
may sound morbid. Some might even worry about my state of mind. But it’s not,
and you needn’t. For me, at least, occasional existential encounters of this
sort are part of aging, part of taking stock of where life has brought me and
what life in this place looks like. On another day, soon, I’ll be marveling at
the sky or the wind or the amazing artistry of a local chorus or the vibrancy
of queer youth.
Life’s like that—it’s
complicated.
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