* * Feeling mortal

I guess at some point in every adult’s life, we’ve all thought about our mortality. This was heavy on my mind the other evening as I visited with one of my nonagenarian friends who lives at a local retirement home nearby.

To protect his privacy I won’t mention his name.

He was one of my professors at Virginia Tech when I earned my degree in the 1970s. He is a slight man, grandfatherly, sagacious, and soft-spoken, quick to expound others’ virtues, with a John Nash-like beautiful mind. He literally wrote the textbook that we used for several quarters – we were on the quarter system in those days rather than semesters – in one of the college’s most demanding courses. He’s told me that he’d ask his students on the first day of the quarter to please sit in the same seat for the first three sessions, after which they could sit anywhere they wanted, as by that time he would have memorized every name. He was widely admired by all of the thousands of students he taught. I call on him when I can, fully knowing that he won’t be with us much longer.

He has a whole bevy of doctors attending to his various infirmities these days. He told me he’d recently acquired a cane to assist with his stumbling around his building and he’d gotten lessons in how to use it. He has diabetes and he’s managed it well for decades, but as his body has gone through physiological changes, the implementation of his medications has required commensurate modifications, often difficult to properly assess. Getting old, as the expression goes, ain’t for sissies.

Most gut-wrenching for him is his loss of memory. He had become horrified at the realization that he was often now unable to remember names of his doctors, his stock-brokers, and many other professionals on whom he’d relied on for decades. Now mind you, here’s a guy with an astonishing, world-class intellect, a power of recall the rest of us merely dream of. I tried to assuage his feelings of creeping inadequacy, doing my best to convince him that first of all, memory loss is a common problem with aging, and second, it’s the way the rest of us work habitually. (Why did I just walk into the kitchen???)

The world will be a poorer place when he passes. The rest of us go on until our last day comes. We all have an expiration date. We all know this; we all have an understanding and awareness of that irrefutable fact.

My life has been blessed in that regard. Unlike my wife, whose father died when she was a teen, few people in my close personal sphere have died young. My parents are only a few years younger than that aforementioned friend, and while they have their aches and pains are generally in good health and are self-sufficient and living in the house where I grew up. But they both understand that they are giving their actuarial tables a run for their money.

Furthermore, my younger brother is battling a life-threatening disease. His treatment is costly, intrusive, painful, disruptive, and uncertain in the best case. We don’t much talk about the worst case, but we know it’s there.

We should all be blessed with long, healthy lives…but we’re not.

I was thrown into introspection on my short drive home that evening, wondering about the place mortality takes in others’ lives. My own mortality is not an omnipresent ogre, weighing on my psyche. I’m not making everyday decisions in the notion that I might die today, although the possibility is always there. (Note: I ride a motorcycle 250-300 days per year, including this morning (It was 19F on my way to my office.).) I suspect that people who have greater awareness are those who lost a close family member when they were young. How about you?

In her book, Wild, author Cheryl Strayed wrote, “The universe, I'd learned, was never, ever kidding. It would take whatever it wanted and it would never give it back.” Life is a precarious, precious thing.

When the phone rings, do you expect it to be the police telling you your spouse has died in a traffic accident? When you get mail from the US Government, do you expect to open an envelope and learn your son has died in the war? When you get a check-up, do you expect the worst?

If you’re so moved, shoot me an email at bikemike@nrvunwired.net and let me know what part your own mortality plays in your life.