I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, focused on launching a writing and advisory business around personal finance for GenXers. I’m blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
I started dating someone who is twelve years older than I am. I had already been in a space of contemplating death, but now even more so. While I don’t know what will happen with this new relationship, it still makes me think, “What if we stay together? What if I lose him before I’m ready? What if I’m the one to go first?” It all feels painful in advance.
My beloved Aunt Betty died at 75 years of age after decline from Alzheimer’s. She looked about 90 when she died: completely gray hair, stooped back, giant glasses, using a cane. Meanwhile her husband—eight years older than she was—was tall, slim, energetic, and on top of things. He lived for ten years after she did. The older one doesn’t always go first. The woman doesn’t always go first either.
I’ve observed a wide range of functioning in people of different ages at mid- and late life. A 50-year-old can need hip replacements and sometimes suffer effects of early dementia even as 80-year-olds act (almost) as good as new.
And of course death can come at any time, no matter how aged we appear, no matter what number of years we’ve reached, no matter our health status.
As I’ve been thinking about planning for my future, I’ve been thinking a lot about death. I think about it because my stepdad died in February, and he was the first of the older generation of my family to do so. I think about it because I don’t want to drag on like another aunt did, stuck in a memory care unit not knowing her brothers or her nephews and nieces, for years. I think about it because, I admit, at times in my life I’ve been ready to go. I haven’t ever been actively suicidal but I’ve regularly had the wish that it could all be over.
I’ve told my kids and sisters I don’t want to hang around too long. Getting to 75 like my aunt seems ok. Going on beyond that? Sometimes I wonder if I’d really want to.
There are good reasons to keep going as long as possible though, primarily because it allows us to live out our purpose as human beings: to give and receive love.
In David Richo’s How to Be an Adult in Love, he writes in the introduction:
My guess is that loving is what we are here for, that love is what every one of us deserves to receive and is here to give, that love alone makes this earth the heaven it was meant to be.
And:
Giving and receiving love can become our primary life focus. Focusing on this combination is a way to become fully human, to fulfill ourselves psychologically. If love comes our way, it is welcome and enriching. But in spiritual practice, our focus is on giving love rather than finding someone from whom to receive it. We feel fulfilled spiritually when we show all the love we have, no matter how others respond or act toward us. This is a radical alternative to showing love in order to receive it in return or showing it only to those who love us.
Feeling the reverberations of a new relationship into the future makes me want to stick around. Then that makes me worry I’m going to lose all I love. In time, I will, through my death and through that of others. But I can still commit to making the giving and receiving of love the primary purpose of my life while I am here.
I am so fortunate to be surrounded by people I love, and who love me: most of all my three children, but also my parents (still with us, and with all their marbles), my two sisters, my nieces and nephews, and a handful of close friends. I also have my dog and two cats. What are companion animals for, if not for giving and reciving love?
I started out thinking I would make death the main subject of this post and now here I am going on about love.
Yesterday, I went for a hike and a coffee with one of my best friends. Her father has advanced prostate cancer, and doesn’t have near enough time left on this earth. When I dropped my friend off at her dad’s house, he came out to greet me. We knew each other from when I was in high school. He smiled a beaming smile and gave me a big hug. It was a little act of love. I wasn’t expecting it. I didn’t know he remembered me. It felt so good, and so painful too.
Maybe next week or on Thursday I will share something from Pema Chödrön’s book How We Live is How We Die. That was what I was going to write about, about how facing death squarely helps you live more fully. Maybe that is what this post was about: acknowledging the inevitability of death and therefore realizing the importance of committing more fully to giving and receiving love as the purpose of my life.