God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlefolk

 

I have been grieving my parents somewhat these last couple of weeks, reflecting on their quiet isolation out at All Saints, away from the activities of the living, such as they are under COVID, remembering our old holiday life. Wistful, I called Nelson’s Flowers to order a wreath for their tombstone and got the last fresh one, the one my mom used to order for Stevie’s grave. I was brought to tears by the thought that I had gestured rightly, that my sense of loss connected to my mother’s so perfectly, coincidentally, and so timely, and that I spoke with someone who knew my mother and her floral taste and preferences, who approved and, perhaps, was gratified to learn that my mother’s practice would be carried on. These attenuated vestiges of past life, whose provenance is lost, or will be in due time, faintly echo the beauty, mysterious and fragile, that makes our life singular, worth living, and, alas, necessitates our dying. Last week I hung the Christmas bells in the front window. They are not identical to the bells that tolled in our front windows in West Middlesex and Mercer, but they do the job, and, a gift from Karen, a new one as well. An old man with much to look back upon fondly, I look forward as well, though perhaps less avidly, to this world without parents. 

 

Thank you, Stefan

 

For my birthday, my only begotten son gifted me this plein air landscape. Many would find it an odd choice; his sister, a comically odd one. But I do not, unduly, though it did bemuse and raise a smile. Having grown up next door to a cemetery, I find them familiar places, homey even, a little melancholy, perhaps, but restful, quiet, still, old-timey, slow to change, literary, serious—grave. Like me. It is not unwise to consider Death next door. And I’ve visited my brother at one, All Saints, for almost fifty years now, the brother for whom my son is named, which lends his gift a particular and appropriate resonance. And while I don’t propose at last to rest in peace in one myself, cemeteries, and any image of one, are trenchant mementos mori. Reminders of mortality on any occasion are a true gift, as is mortality.

 

This Country of Old Men

Turned sixty-two yesterday, eligible to claim Social Security, the second milestone of old age—and the first official one.  And while I probably won’t for a few more years yet, it’s good to know that one can, and imagine subsisting, however precariously and thought experimentally, on that minimalist fixed income as some hermit, some bookish Aqualung. It’s not the retirement that I would prefer, that I would choose of course, but sometimes you don’t get to choose. Best to consider the whole spectrum.

At my spouse’s prompting, I have begun Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal. It’s good, but nothing new to me, having long previously read Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die and Cicero’s On Old Age. I am reminded that “memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas—to multitask—peaks [sic] in midlife and gradually declines. Processing speed starts decreasing well before the age of forty.” Over twenty years ago for me and right about the time I finished my dissertation. Deferring my intellectual projects until such time as my intellect is not the thing that it was once can seem not a little mistaken, something of a waste. But however diminished, I can still be fully, subjectively engaged, which is how we should be passing our time, I think. That I may not have anything fresh to say to the universe is not really my problem.

Recently, two old men vied for the leadership of this country. And while the better old man prevailed—much to my relief, but hardly to any fond hope—a third old man, Mitch McConnell, and a rank crop of other men, many old, which is why we call them “senators,” (from L, senex: old man) loom patently unready and largely unable to address the divisions of these so-called United States. Having long studied the history, the institutions, and the political culture of this country, I am only slightly less doubtful of its future now, and my retirement in it. But we avoided the worst.

Love in COVID Times: Life Going On

Seven months into this physically-distanced, socially removed COVID world, I married Karen (not the vapid “Karen” of media notoriety, rather her anti-type), my Karen, just hours before the moon entered Scorpio, which I understand to be a bad thing. After a few years of live-in courtship and recent convolutions in planning a ceremony, we eloped, somewhat last minute, to the north country and, amidst full fall colors, wed on the rocks in fewer than four hundred words.

Why marry at sixty-one? Well, my father some years ago recommended it; he had enjoyed sixty-four years of married life before dying this past June. My mother, likewise, had long preferred it before dying a few months earlier in March; in her last days, she had beamed mutely at hearing news of our intentions. But I rarely followed my father’s life advice, and my mother, who may have endured sixty-four years of marriage more than she enjoyed them (I trust she had her moments), may have wanted to see my and Karen’s partnership in less problematic theological terms than living in sin. Whatever the motives behind their endorsement, I was happy to know that if in attendance, they would be pleased. Perhaps they were. And yet, I did not marry for them, though in marrying, I honored them.

Stoic philosophy, you might be surprised to learn, recommends marriage as well, for the possibility of “a community of life” and for the purpose of children. Now, of course, at our moderately advanced age, children are entirely out of the question. We’ve had ours, respectively, and simply cannot conceive of more or better—though we have, strangely, somehow acquired a rescue cat, Goob. Insofar as I can articulate a reason behind my intuition, this impulse to wed, it must be this sense of commitment to a community of life with someone, these specific creatures, Karen and Goob, mostly Karen. A community of self-sufficient introverts is no mean feat, but it offers a worthy purpose for the final phase of this man’s life.

And did I mention “love”? I did not, not because I do not feel it, or say it to my beloved on occasion, only because as a Borowicz male, one doesn’t make a public display of such things. And “love” makes a very short blog post to the query, why marry in old age? Same reason we marry in youth, really. Same reason we marry at all. Love, the inspiration of which is ageless.

R.I.P. Norbert

Bereft now of both my parents, I am an orphan at 61. Adult onset orphanage is the best kind of orphanage because you’ve had all the benefits of their parenthood lifelong—with a few, it is true, of the difficulties. Moreover, at senior orphanage, you have the added benefit of the lessons of their dying at a time in your own life when those lessons are more likely to be heeded. The chief distinction to be made here, an obvious one, but at the same time one we often fail to make (fudging death and dying into a single concept) is that death is death, the finality, and dying the process thereunto.

Some philosophers and writers argue that we are always in the process of dying. I don’t think so. As a metaphor, it has its melancholy attraction, but as a working assumption for life, it is lugubrious. While we inhabit an entropic universe as agents of disorder, for at least some of our time here on earth, we are, rather, creating our lives, an internal order of self, out of our genetic inheritance, our surrounding material world, and our experience. We are living. This is life. At some point, and I place this point much later in time than many—I place it long after our physical “prime of life,” as it is sometimes called, or even after our cognitive prime—we begin to die.

My mother, as I recorded in this blog, died in early March. But she began dying in the summertime, after the death of her sister-in-law, my Aunt Jo, my father’s younger sister, who died last summer. Over sixty years of familiarity, they had become “best friends,” my mother and Aunt Jo, who spoke on the phone almost every day in their last years. When my mother lost that connection, her physical and cognitive decline was swift. She suffered heart problems and probably a stroke or two that left her mute. A woman of faith and prayer, she had come to terms with both her dying and death, I trust, but because we never talked about either specifically in those terms, I have still pangs of doubt. Perhaps there is always vulnerability in the eyes of the dying, even the most prayerful and faithful.

My father, on the other hand, had quite clearly come to terms with death. A number of years ago he had relayed to me, convincingly, that he was just “waiting for the call.” He had written his own epitaph, his own obituary—which required some editing for length and relevancy—and had asked me to speak at his funeral about his faith, a task of no little delicacy given that I had left the Church forty-something years ago. What he had not really considered nor understood, it seems to me, was the process of dying. He seemed to think that he would simply, some morning, wake up dead. Or, if he had to go through some formal process, he would have my mother to help him through. Neither of those possibilities eventuated.

Instead, grousing and grumbling about the pain in his right chest and the general incompetence of the medical profession, and unacknowledgingly missing his wife of sixty-three years, whom he had mistakenly imagined himself to precede in death, and counseling me not to “get old,” (he was ninety-effing five), he struggled with the process of dying. “Why am I still here?” he would wonder of a new morning. Because most of us have to die to be dead, Pop. Process.

And so, he began, we think, to more or less starve himself, where his pills represented the chief constituent of his diet, with a swallow or two of Ensure. No more biscuits of Shredded Wheat, drowning soggily and all too sweetly in milk or half and half; no more deep-fried Admiral’s Feasts;  no shrimp scampi, “Ooh, that’s goohd;” no black raspberry milkshakes, medium wings. His last meal was half a peanut butter meltaway. Perhaps unknowingly, perhaps only unadmittedly starved for the love embodied in Rita’s full person—womanly, wifely, motherly, grandmotherly, and just basic humanly—he seems to have gone on a hunger strike of sorts and took the dying process back into his own hands. We buried him this past Tuesday next to her.

You can rest in peace now, old man.