Living and Dying in the 3/4 Time

Or maybe I just have a lot of sick friends this week.

“The old men know, when an old man dies.”  That’s a line from an Ogden Nash poem.  And it’s come to mind lately, as I’ve encountered a series of funerals and health problems for people in my circle.

I’m not really an old man yet.  At 63, I’m still “middle aged” in the minds of many Americans who, according to polls, see 65 as middle aged.  And it’s certainly true that nowadays when someone dies in their seventies, the reaction is more likely to be “so young!” than “well, of course.” 

But.

While by life-stage that may be right – people 65 and under usually haven’t retired, are often still raising kids (people have kids later, and extended childhood means extended parenthood, too) – still, 65 is really only the middle of life if you expect to live to 130.  There may well be people alive today who’ll live to 130 or beyond, but they’re probably younger than 65, and anyway, that’s all conjectural.  (My – late – friend Mark Hopkins told me he’d done the longevity-research  math and ours would be the last generation to die.)

Sure, Henry Kissinger made it past 100, and centenarians are the fastest growing age cohort.  But actuarially, I’m probably more like ¾ through my expected lifespan.  I’d like to live longer, of course, and I very much want to stay healthy as long as possible.  As a friend says, better to be the oldest guy in the weight room than the youngest guy in the nursing home.

But that fact is, once you get past your mid-fifties, you notice that contemporaries start dying off at an accelerated rate.  I lost a few people earlier:  an ex-girlfriend from college died of lung cancer at 33, despite being a lifelong nonsmoker, and there were a few auto accidents, etc.  But I quit as class secretary for my law school class because I started to get depressed by having to report a death every other column.

So it’s a case of living and dying in the ¾ time, with a nod to the (late) Jimmy Buffett.

What does that mean?

For me I guess it means thinking about my remaining years more carefully.  When you’re younger, your future lifespan seems to stretch out, not endlessly, but indefinitely.  Now I have to think harder about what I want to accomplish in the 20 years or so that constitute my most likely useful lifespan.  Sure, I could live twice that long, or I could die tomorrow, but that’s a reasonable midrange.   I’ve dumped some projects I meant to get to someday, like a treatise on the Tennessee Constitution, because I just don’t think they’re something I want to put that much time into.  I care much more about the bang-for-the-buck return on work now.

And maybe it means more about work/life balance.  I always said I’d never retire, but recently ran across a couple of former colleagues and their spouses at brunch, whose advice to me was to retire while I’m early enough to enjoy it.  Both of them wished they’d retired some years earlier. 

For me, of course, it’s not entirely clear what that means.  I could retire from my day job, but I like teaching students and writing legal stuff.  And even if I did, I have several other jobs – the blog, the newspaper column, these Substack essays, etc.  Would I retire from everything?  Honestly, I could sit home, read books ,and drink wine, and be perfectly happy.  But I think I want to be more engaged with the world than that.

But at present, I have a close, lifelong friend who just had a cancerous tumor removed from his kidney, a family member in the ICU with heart problems, and a longterm acquaintance who just dropped dead at 64 with apparently no warning.  So it does have me thinking.

Carpe diem, and all that.  I hope you don’t find these thoughts morbid, because I’m not feeling morbid, but it’s hard not to notice the people dying.  I can see how old people get survivor’s guilt just from outliving everyone.  And not just old people, as the Jim Carroll Band makes plain:

Of course, that’s the point.  To us, old age and death go together more than to historical generations, because fewer people die young.  Thoreau’s brother died of tetanus after he cut himself shaving, a kind of death that was commonplace for most of human history.  And still is, in some subsets of our society, as Jim Carroll points out.

Talking about things with my high school friends on our annual retreat, one of us commented that he feels as good physically, and is still as productive at work, but that he has far fewer fucks to give.  This produced general agreement.  One of the privileges of reaching this point in life, if you’ve done things right, is the privilege of not taking seriously those things (and people) that don’t deserve to be taken seriously.  And accompanying that is the need to take seriously those things that do so deserve.

Jim Carroll’s crowd (at least in the song) died young.  But for us middle-aged, middle-class people, the ¾ time is a time for a bit of reflection, for figuring out how the later acts should go, for establishing legacies, financial and otherwise.  And for enjoying the time that remains.  Which I intend to do fully!  I invite you to join me.

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