A New Kind of Anticipation

It’s funny how age sneaks up on you. This is not new news, of course—I remember always speaking about it with my parents, who were unusually open in discussing life’s (and consciousness’) essential confoundery, the way one is constantly craning one’s neck to try to get the big view. But nonetheless, there’s no preparing for its eventual descent.

These days I am feeling age. Not feeling old, but feeling the years lived and collected, like dust bunnies under the basement staircase or layers of paint on woodwork. The last of my shiny and new is disappearing, both inside and out, and I’ve been surprised at the weight of that shift.

I remember when my ex-husband and I were breaking up that I said to him one night when we were more sad than mad, “You took my young. No one will ever have that again and now you are taking it away from me,” by leaving with his memories, which we would no longer share in casual banter or knowing jokes. Those wild years when you think every dream you’ve ever had will come true, when you wear clothes that raise your own eyebrows today, when the world really does feel like it belongs to you.

Today I feel that I belong to the world.

I welcome this change—as I finally know that no matter who or what I am, no matter what kind of day I’m having, I belong—but it still has its embedded loss. Because I see not only myself more clearly with age, but also the world. I carry sadness that there is so much abuse and hate in the human experience. I feel heartbreak that my voice isn’t loud enough to help people to truly understand deep within that wishing and insisting others be like themselves is the most egotistical, cruel and small thing a human can do with his or her intentions. I know why people are seduced by fear’s siren call—the way it can so mysteriously invert itself from inside us and turn outward, appearing as false strength and certainty—but I wish I could convince them that event the coldest comforts of truth are better companions for this journey.

But those are my large, grandiose desires. (Why else be a human if other than to have grandiose idea and desires?)

I have small ones, too: Please let my son find his way in life, locate his tribe and make the right choices when I am no longer here to guide him. Please let me live long enough to see some of his own successes, whatever they may be. Please allow me the luxury of living a few years in the countryside, so I can be close to nature and walk many miles of pathways through nearby woods to balance out these years in New York.

And the other night, I heard this desire, for the first time: Please let me die without too much pain.

I have never been afraid of death. But I am realizing I am now completely afraid of dying “after a long but brave battle” with fill-in-the-blank.

Yesterday, I went to see my Ob/Gyn, the woman who brought my son into this world, and with whom I have become great friends. She talked me through my divorce (when I told her at my six-month postnatal checkup that my husband was ending our marriage, she said, “Oh, no, you too?”), through depression, through crazy-busy all-consuming career times, the illness and death of my parents. And yesterday she said, “I’ve been looking at your records and I think you should see a genetic counselor.” Because of the cancers in my family background, and the heart disease, and the diabetes and and and…

And I just thought: And so it begins, like this.

I guess it really is a midpoint in life. I’ve been blessed with 43 years in very good health, despite my ever-changing weight (fortunately it isn’t on a perpetual up; there are some downs in there through the years as well). And when I look at what’s next, I think 43 years more seems about right, if luck stays on my side. But my parents weren’t lucky, both dying quite suddenly at 70 and 71. However, I’ve always been active, much more active than my parents. And I’ve always loved fish and not loved steak (until the last five years when suddenly steak just seems so delicious!). I have crazy-high good cholesterol and crazy-low bad cholestorol. And I tend to my mental health and am conscious of managing the stress I perpetually seek out. I even have periods in my life where I meditate regularly! Right now not being one of them. (Note to self.)

So I add all these new things to the list of what makes up the contents of my head: medical tests, cancer diagnoses, cruel and sudden deaths, car accidents, friends’ children struggling with special needs. My upcoming mammogram. My already scheduled biannual colonoscopy (remember that’s every TWO years, not twice a year). The anniversaries of my parents’ deaths. I’m waiting for different things now, marking time with different life events. I’m older.

I continue to believe life is magical, mysterious, confounding, fair and unfair in equal measure, unknowable, but above all, worthy. That’s the optimist in me, I suppose. But I admit that, aside from the mystery of being forever 27 in my head as my body counts each passing day, I’m most surprised to discover that the act of turning in my innocence for the gift of widsom comes with a wistful side of poignant, the pinpricks of which I feel in my side just a little bit, every single day.