By the time one reaches one’s sixties, one has a backward vision of one’s own life, and of the lives of those others with whom one has been close. One can see the roads taken and not taken, the turnings in those roads, the opportunities taken and those that were missed, the wrong decisions (and the right ones), one can see the patterns. And by one’s sixties, one can fairly well predict the end of the road, mostly more of the same as what has gone before. Rarely does one’s life change significantly after a certain age, except for the changes illness wreaks, and then of course, ultimately, the change into non-being when death comes.
For some of my friends and family, the end of the road has come already, the life is finished, complete, it is as it stands and will be forever such, nothing can come to change it.
For others—myself included—we’re still on the journey. But of those of us still on the journey, there are two categories. Those whose lives have turned out fairly well, and those whose lives have gone wrong. Fortunately, I see more of the former than the latter, yet among my entourage, there are some lives that have simply turned bad, and it’s hard to see any redeeming factor in how they are going nor comprehend the disaster, it’s hard to understand why those lives in particular have become lost lives, wasted lives, unhappy lives, tragic lives.
Just yesterday I was on the phone with two friends, both of whom have shipwrecked lives. The ship of one of them, a man in his early seventies, crashed against the sharp rocks of life some fifteen years ago. He had been up until then one of the most cultivated, literate human beings of my acquaintance, a high post in the cultural ministry, and practicing his own art on the sideline. No marriage, no children, but a wide range of friends, famous and not-so-famous. And then, suddenly we heard that there had been a change in his job status, that he had gone into a depression. And from there, it has been downhill all the way—suicide attempts, shock treatment, inability to live alone, and, a spiraling sense of self-loathing and guilt. All pleasure in life vanished, and gradually the inner deterioration has led to an exterior deterioration. This man’s life is hell, yet he cannot seem to either emerge from that hell or end his life—and now he must submit the further indignity of grave health problems.
The second friend was a happy ebullient man when I knew him 20 years ago. Life was all ahead of him, and he leapt forward joyfully to meet it, full of enthusiasm and energy. But now he is caught into a maelstrom of misery: a marriage that is disintegrating, a business going badly, health problems, and without a single second of respite, no time at all for himself, no time to contemplate the world and his place in it, to suck the nectar from the flower. His life has become joyless and he himself is the quintessence of the harried middle-aged man, running from metro to job to home to metro to job to home. How could this have happened in such a short time—that a man’s life just turned around so completely and headed down the road to disaster? Is it destiny, fate, genetic determination, just plain bad luck, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, is it the result of one’s character (“character is destiny”). I don’t have the answer, I don’t know what can account for these shipwrecks? And I can think of others, a man who is seriously obese, with plenty of money but who barely leaves his home anymore, spending his life on the computer, a woman who lived much of her life in a tiny closet-like apartment, there too no husband, no children, and who died alone of cancer at too young an age. A childhood friend who in her late fifties just went mad, became a Miss Haversham, inventing a bridegroom, a wedding, for her shocked friends and family (who when they arrived for the wedding found her in her shabby dressing gown with rotting bridal food in the fridge). This friend and I used to write stories and poems together when we were twelve up in my tree house—we lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools, graduated with honors, went on to travel, to have a life. But somewhere, in hers, the mechanism just stopped functioning. Her friends do not know if she is wandering the streets or dead—one day, she just disappeared. And then, there is my mother-in-law, who took so little pleasure from life when she was in it, when she could, and who for the past 16 years has been dead to the world although her heart continues to beat, buried alive in a retirement home. Another life gone horribly horribly wrong.
But most of us in my little world, thank heaven, have lives that have gone mostly right. Of course there are rocky patches, of course there are sorrows, mingled with the joys, disappointments mingled with the successes, but on the whole, I would say the majority of my friends and family members have lives that have gone mostly right. Lives that are filled with people who love us and whom we love, with work that satisfies, with enough money to keep poverty at the door, with varied experiences, with children, grandchildren, travel, with sunlit days on terraces. And it is not a premature death nor an illness which necessarily makes a life go wrong—I think of our friend Josh, who has just died of cancer at the age of 62. Far too young. And the past ten years, he was battling that illness. Yet his life never “went wrong” despite his illness—he continued to live life as he always had, and this up until the last week of his life. He retained his love of life and of travel, his humor, his attachment to his friends and family—he did everything exactly right. Last December, he took his last trip, with his wife Laura, to Death Valley, a place he’d always loved, to find a place for his ashes. They took pictures on this last trip of theirs, and the photos of this loving couple in that strange magnificent setting, show them smiling, full of energy, full of life although death was stalking them, intent on the beauty of the world and absolutely conscious of their place in it. Josh, a life well lived.
Time beats its relentless drum. I hear its booming. I know that we have just one thing to do as the drum beats: love life! Embrace it, hold it close, enter fully into it, do not let bitterness or disillusionment or disappointment or sorrow or fear cast its shadow over the years we have left. Tempus fugit. Carpe diem. Seize the day!
