Doc's Old School Blog: Aging as a grace

That you’re more competent than ever. That you’re wiser than ever. That you’re better at spotting and avoiding bullshit than ever. The list goes on.#

None of those are hard, except in the sense that they aren’t much talked about.#

I’m 74 now, and still working, still contributing to the world, still engaged with my communities, still having a good time. So I’m lucky that way. But here’s the strange thing: I know that luck will run out. I know I’m going to die, and I expect it can happen at any time. Because life is a losing game of Labyrinth.#

My joke about mortality is that I know I’m in the exit line, but let others cut in.#

It’s less funny when friends and relatives do exactly that. All the memorial services I’ve been to recently (or missed, thanks to the pandemic) have been for friends younger than me. The generation that raised me—the one called “greatest”—is entirely gone. Too many from Gen X have been cutting in too.#

But I’ve also come to see death as a feature, not a bug. Mortality is a grace, not a curse.#

I learned that from my mother, after she died. It happened one day while I was driving somewhere and thought of something I wanted to share with her. I heard her voice, clear as ever, tell me her absence was good because it forced me to share my love (or whatever was on my mind at the time) with other people.#

Such as now.#