333. Birthdays and death

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Birthday part 1

Today (when I wrote this, but it's been sitting for weeks) would be my father's 99th birthday. It would also have been the 20th anniversary of his easy death in his sleep. But that didn't quite happen. Instead of "going gentle into that good night" he had to struggle in hospital as the light too slowly faded.

I wish he had had the easier death, though if he had, I would not have had a chance to observe it and would have lost that very educational, if uncomfortable, experience. What I learned is that, at the end, you have very little control over events. Or at least you can't count on having much control. It will be what it will be. And as with illness in general, you just have to ride it out as best you can.

This evening I was in my neighborhood bar having a martini in my dad's honor, and caught the very end of the Duke basketball game. And I mean the very end, as I sat down they were just running out the clock so I didn't get to see a single play. As a Louisville boy, my dad must have been distressed by dying just as March Madness was getting started. Meanwhile I only watch the highlights of the Warrior's victories. I'm a pathetic sports fan.

Europa

Leaving the gym today there was a guy just outside the gym playing an acoustic version of Carlos Santana's Europa. It wasn't an electric guitar, but it was amplified, so I could still hear the song as I crossed Sutter and walked down Trinity Place. Covering Santana is dangerous, but this guy was doing a good job. He was just to my favorite part of the song, the four rising, sustained notes that take it up into the stratosphere, and I was wondering how he was going to negotiate this with a conventional guitar. Wisely, he didn't even try. Though that is a frustrating way to end the song.

Birthday part 2

The other day I was reading an interesting piece from Medium about our relationship with death -- can't find it now. The author was probably around thirty and his doctors thought he might have a serious problem, though by the end of the piece the tests has come back favorably. Still, he had been forced to confront his own mortality... to see the elephant, to reinterpret a phrase from the Great War.

Some people spend their entire lives obsessed with death, some never seem to notice death until something unexpected, like this health diagnosis, comes up later in their lives. This author spoke of the immortality of children and teens who never seem to think of death. Of course there are always the exceptions to this. And he also spoke of seeing his own death in the mirror, of being aware that it was always with him. This is an idea that I believe Phillip Pullman also played with in His Dark Materials. 

An aspect of being in what must now be considered my late sixties, is that you can't get away from death and aging. Recently I learned that my boss from thirty years ago, who was a couple years younger than me, suddenly died in his sleep. Yesterday I was watching a PBS Space Time episode I had previously missed featuring Richard Branson (both Branson and Pullman are, "Sirs") and couldn't help noticing that he was only a year older than me and that the sun had not been kind to him.

I think I look a bit younger than my age because I've done a good job of avoiding the sun because I was aware of that danger. I'm out in the sun a lot during event greening season, but the sun rarely touches my skin. I could almost be a vampire. 

But sixty-seven is sixty-seven regardless of how well you're holding up. You notice the gaps in your cohort even if you don't attend the funerals. You know that your death is with you, even if it's likely that it remains twenty years off. For my birthday I'm slowly hitting all of my favorite places to eat, but I'm not overdoing it. Mission Pie is still on my list, so there will be at least one desert, but I'm also ramping up at the gym, so things aren't getting out of hand. Thanks to being a veggie, my most decadent eating is actually quite healthy. I'll probably die of some strange interaction of brown rice and tofu.