Seventy years old.
It surprises me, to be honest. Mom didn’t make it to seventy. Neither did Susan, nor my cousins Frank and Karen, nor so many other friends and family members.
I wasn’t given much chance of making it to seventy after my heart attack. They gave me a 30% chance of surviving the surgery, and not a much better chance of surviving until the surgery.
But here I am.
Life has given me far more goodness than I ever imagined it could. I wake up without aches and pains. I walk five miles or more every day, and enjoy it even more now than I did when I began this habit more than twenty-three years ago. I eat the foods I enjoy, and enjoy the foods I eat. I listen to music every day, and still get the same thrill from it that I did when I first began buying records more than sixty years ago. I have never, not even one day, had to work a job I didn’t enjoy. I have dear and loving friends who value our friendship as much as I do, so they adjust their schedules to make sure we get to share a couple of meals together every week.
And I share my life with a beautiful, talented, amazing woman who has the courage to do things I could never bring myself to do, and I get to wake up next to her every day and lay my head on the pillow next to her every night. We share walks, we share meals, we share laughter, we share tears, we share stories of our lives before we met one another, and every week I learn new things about her that make me love her even more. Before I met her, I didn’t think I could ever find love again. She proved me wrong.
My immediate family may be gone now—Mom and Dad died too many years ago, while Alzheimer’s has taken my dear sister Kimberly from me memory by memory over the past several years—but I have threefamilies now. There is my family by blood—Aunt Jean and Uncle Red, my niece Jessica and my cousin Cathy, as well as my aunts Donna and Martha, both of whom are closer to cousins than aunts since only a small handful of years separate us. There is my family by choice—Charles, Darrell, James, Eddie, Ralph, Buck, Izzy, and Shelley, all of whom make each week of my life better. And now there is my family by marriage—Karen’s family, who have accepted and welcomed this quirky, introverted newcomer into their lives.
I’ve lost so many that I’ve loved in the past seventy years. Five cats have been lifelong companions to me, and I was there when each of them left this world; I’d like to think I learned from each of them how to love more and care more for the cat who followed.
But the deaths of Mom, of Dad, and of Susan—a part of me died with each one of them. But I learned from that. I learned the value of loving while you have the opportunity, and making sure that the people you love know how much they mean to you. A single moment could be all that stands between love and loss.
Death makes some people afraid to love again, or it fills them with regret that they loved at all, since every love has to end with sorrow for the person left behind. But I remember there are no great moments that I remember from any time in my life that don’t involve someone I loved, someone who loved me… That’s what love is. It’s every wonderful moment of your life, shaped into a multi-faceted gem of a memory—the treasure no one can take away from you. Death isn’t a reason to be afraid of love—it’s the reason you should love. It’s the best thing life can give you.
My obsession with numbers and statistics is no secret, so it may surprise a lot of people that I don’t place significance on the “landmark” birthdays. Twenty-one, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, sixty-five, and now seventy—they’re not turning points in my life. I’m only a day older than I was yesterday. I don’t know if I’ll ever feel old. I hope I don’t. I’m still filled with ambitions and plans and dreams, and many of them are the same ambitions and plans I had when I was a kid, a teenager, or a young adult. I still feel a rush of enthusiasm with new technology; I still feel a flood of emotions from new music; I still get lost in new books; I still rediscover my sense of wonder in new comics; I still want to tell more stories; I still hope to draw more; I still lose myself in playing my guitar, even though I’m little better now than I was when I took it up more than a half-century ago.
And there are new things, too. Dancing, which I never imagined I’d be able to do, absolutely enthralls me. I value the moments I get to share with my neighbors, many of whom have become so important to me. I want to make more trips with Karen, even though I have spent most of my life sticking close to home. I hear Karen playing the piano and I want to do that, even though I’ve never done so. I pluck at a mandolin, because I love its sound. I play drums now, even though I have no skill at it yet.
Life is a process of scrutinizing the things that fill your days and deciding which ones to keep, which ones to discard, and which ones to add. I’m lucky. I keep finding things in all three catagories.
So I’m seventy now, as of about two and a half hours ago. And I’m okay with that.
