Whose Idea Was This?

Write as if you were dying.
- Annie Dillard

Birth. Growth. Decline. Death.

Who came up with that system? It is ridiculous.

When I look at the timeline of the past five years of my life, the deaths predominate. Of the beings I observed at their deaths or nearly, all were suffering. For the people whose deaths happened in my town, I have no words.

Of the two people whose deaths I observed most intimately, my mother’s, and then three months later, my grandmother’s, both lived their last moments in their beds, on their backs, mouths open, eyes half-open.  It was terrible for them, terrible to witness.

If my life is not foreshortened by accident, I, too, will decline through illness or old age and suffer until I will be on my back, jaw hanging, eyes staring.

What could possibly be the purpose, meaning or value to this?

I am a student of existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom’s work.  He writes, “...the only true absolute is that there are no absolutes,” and “If there are no absolutes, then nothing is more important than anything else, and everything is a matter of indifference.”

In other words, life has no meaning.

Great.

My mother died at 78, her parents in their 50s, my father’s father in his 80s, my father's mother at 101, and my father is a healthy, if-stunned-after-losing-his-wife-and-mother-within-about-four-months-of-each-other 78.  I’ll be 53 in two weeks.  Let’s say I have another 25 years left.

Twenty-five years of life ahead without meaning. Full of a timeline of deaths, ending with my own.

This is a ridiculous system.

Okay. Fine.

If life has no meaning, the lesson from the timeline is that what happens in a life happens.  I look at that list and envision a croquet mallet pounding my little wicket self closer and closer to the ground.  Although I exerted it mightily, my power was not enough to make any of the events on that timeline not happen.  Existentially, maybe they had no real meaning.  Every moment of those five years was lived by me and each one was of profound, intense, acute personal meaning to me.  Neuro-bio-chemicial-physio only?  Whatever.  I felt it.

What’s missing from the timeline is joys. I had a few. As they were building, though, there was that croquet mallet again. The frequency and amplitude of the wavelengths of the hits challenged my joy. As I was dressing a few days ago, I threw my arms up over my head. No sound, no movement had triggered the motion. Instinctively, I was fending off blows.

So, the task of the next twenty-five years is to reduce energy given to trying to control life (over which I am mostly powerless) and to increase energy given to handling what happens (I would like to offer a mild protest that the “what happens” is currently in a hard-to-handle quantity) in life (which has no meaning).

Great.