The iconic Mel
Brooks, now known just as much for his longevity as his humor, told interviewer
Kenneth Tynan in 1977 at length of his life-long abject fear of death. A famous Woody Allen quote goes, “I don’t
mind dying…….I just don’t want to be there when it happens..”
Fear of death for
many is not uncommon. People have a right to their fears. But it’s never been one of mine. My own, that is. There’s two kinds of ways to go, and those of
us in the miseried, resigned, sardonic and self-deprecating Al Bundy school of
life are beyond seduced by the thought of that sub-machine-gun toting teenager
prancing into that room and, among others, blowing you away in a painless
instant. All those fears and
responsibilities you’ve come to inherit as a grownup..? Released. You are exonerated from the crime of life’s
journey.
As a Generation
X-er, back when that term was underground-trendy, anti-grownup, and the stuff
of Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke and Janeane Garofalo on the big screen stomping
around in black skirts and electric-red-dyed hair, and Elizabeth “Prozac
Nation” Wurtzel lounging about in psych wards, “death” was simply this coveted
landing on the game board. It was an
extension of what so many of us high-drama, co-dependent kids had actually
grown up crushing on since pre-adolescence.
My own romance with death, after enough movie watching and
fiction-reading, was probably cultivated around age ten or so. If you’re unpopular enough, alienated enough
amongst your peer group, bullied enough (the pre-internet grammar-school
hallway physical threat kind..), and consequently depressed enough, you’ve got
yourself a budding romance..! No
artistic soul could likely come of age without this shot of Cupid’s arrow. Many were the nights, before math tests, intervals
following scream-outs from my mother or a winless encounter with my frustrating
younger cousin who aggravated me to no end, or maybe a day’s end after a
promising threat of assault by the class bully, I’d treat myself to an extended
mind fantasy about how everyone around me would react to the sudden report of
my tragic death, often one self-inflicted.
It was usually better than any Movie Of The Week.
It didn’t end at
childhood. The one free, legal and
plentiful joy that was my best friend growing up would remain my pal as life’s
march progressed. The movie only got
better. Better dialogue, better
cinematography. Sometimes, a
black-and-white imaging a la Cassavettes.. or Frederick Wiseman. But it was always the best movie in town.
What allowed for
that available, stellar entertainment for so long..? The freedom to enjoy it came only from the
advantageous minibar indulgence of taking life’s provisions for granted. Specifically, the people. More specifically, the grown-ups that
controlled the world that showed us no respect, and were very much the floor,
ceiling and walls within which we lived.
They were life’s owners. We were
the pets.
For some of us,
that would hold until well into our forties or more. Some of us would be fifty years old before we
really would begin to learn what the death of others near enough to us would
actually mean in the framework of our own lives.
Life all of us, I’d
lost relatives in my life. My own
mother, who had been more or less “dying for years” was gently ushered out by
God in one tender, attacking moment no one could have anticipated. My surviving, closest elders would within
several years also meet their ends. The
closure on their odysseys were by no means shocking, and I was surrounded by
enough surviving family to bear the shared emotional weight of it all, which in
my case, amounted to a very polite, small denomination.
Those lost were
those who led full lives before I knew them.
As an adult however, as I’ve spent more years knowing folks some years
above me even longer, I’m for the first time recognizing a passage in the human
labyrinth unfamiliar thus far: Age.
Yes, we are all
aging, and in one way or another, we’re showing it. Some, those of us a little more health
conscious and less dangerous in endeavor, weather it better than others, but
here we all are nonetheless, elder cats amongst a population of kittens. And now we have to figure out how to continue
to be ourselves.
Just coming into
work each day and nailing it is not the confident birthright it once was. An awkwardness about age disparity begins to
harbor, even in the most welcoming environments. Every time you log onto the internet,
a home page of sorts tabloids you in the face with grim stories about the
desperate and economically debilitating horrors of mandatory retirement. Logging on for some getaway pleasure on your
day off means shielding your eyes until you make to YouTube, where you can
crank up an old full-length 1979 Game Of The Week with Joe Garagiola, just to
wallpaper the room with some nostalgic comfort food for the ears, the old JC Penney and AC Delco commercials that decorated our lives before prostate health and
cancer treatment videos began pirating on-line entertainment at every turn.
That precious
décor, like the grownups from our pre-teen lives, was the noise we once took
for granted, and is now a resurrected memory, a memory that often brings us
back to the company of those annoying elders, who’d never be able to understand
that we’re a lot more mature than they realize.
Now we are
genuinely mature. And we’re in one way
or another facing it.
Generation X-ers
had mostly no stencil for this sort of graduation in life, at least many
didn’t That’s what’s got us licking the
on-line containers desperately for nostalgic fragments all the time. Just a glimpse of a still photo of your
neighborhood block from 1983 might be the most pain-relieving moment you’ve had
all week.
If you’re lucky and
crafty enough to put all those audio and video fragments together and live
vicariously in the time of your middle-school-hood, hoping to strategically
endure these economically depressed, inflation-threatening times of decaying
Social Security promises and disintegrating health care availabilities the way
our elders did back then, it probably won’t work. We need to forge our own
march through the Inferno, and it’ll be a dangerous one either way.
And that includes
the survival of those who pass.
For some reason,
though I never found jokes about any kind of death “funny”, I’m frightened by
them now. A mere drama involving a
character’s death is suddenly not something I can watch, unless maybe something
Shakesperean or something gothic. Or
maybe the news. Death reports in the news are emotionally harmless. That’s one immunity endowed upon us by the
media.
At what might be
termed just past middle age, a place I am, in my current health-aware state
more grateful to be feeling less than more than ever, with the majority of my
original parts and mechanisms all prayably in working condition, I give thanks
to God every few hours for the blessed few hours I’ve just been granted. And I
visit my inner therapist daily to work on this cultivated fear, the fear of
recognizing what is naturally inevitable to those I know and cherish who are
not quite so many years beyond me anymore, some not so well, and some I know I
will one day no longer see all the time.
For many years,
maybe the first ten years we lived in our neighborhood, a presumably homeless
senior woman held court outside a public building. She was as much a fixture in our town lives
as Norm or Cliff were on Cheers. She’d be shouting comically in her
mountain of blankets and boxes on the corner, and bore no threat to
anyone. Somewhat theatrical at best. No
police or services could remove her at any time, for whatever reason. And although passing her every day and night
in and out of the subway was always at least minimally awkward, it became
difficult to envision our daily lives without her, this now elderly and
louder-than-ever sprite little woman with a voice to match Ethel Merman in It’s
A Mad, Mad, Mad World. One day,
about ten months ago, she became absent permanently. Finally I asked a public officer in the area
who had some information on this elusive character. She died.
If nothing else,
her departure serves towards my own life education, the awareness that unlike
that childish belief in death as the escape, the object of the game is, within
any one’s means to simply appreciate rather than struggle to survive any given
day, to pray thanks for the presence of those in our lives who we still don’t
get to see and talk to enough, the presence of those who drive us up the wall,
the gift of the health that we maintain, the ability to sleep, wake and meet
the day, regardless of any of life’s blessed dramas, and precious thanks for
being able to see, hear, walk through and breathe this very day, one we will
never get to see again. In this world,
it’s still the best deal around.
Noah F.
