Older friends have been lamenting being older. Whenever I’m around these conversations…well…

But you can’t change life simply by ignoring it. It is true we change as we age. And especially if we want the impossible: to be left alone and never grow old.

Sadly, the only solution is to not be around “older friends.”

But younger friends…well…

This past Easter was spent with family around the table. Not one was within 20 years of my age. Conversations swirled around things and ideas I’d either never heard of or heard of over 50 years ago. The constant juxtaposition was astounding. It created a hole in the fabric of conversational time where my contributions appeared irrelevant, meaningless, unimportant, and so, unspoken. It was as if there was nothing to offer.

But…so what?

As a young man I never thought I was the center of the universe, but I did matter. Life progressed, things happened, and then life started to wind down. As the “winding down” happened, life was adjusted, tweaked, re-defined, but in small increments. It was healthy, like eating broccoli in small bites. Anywhere the body was, the body adjusted and found ways to exist with some measure of happiness. Purpose, fate, bad luck, God, none of it was ever questioned for a purpose or an expected explanation. The main reason for the acceptance of change was there was lots more time to live, lots more to accept, lots more to adjust to…years more opportunity for hope and improvement.

So, imagine the surprise when you suddenly realize there is no longer “lots more time to live”.

This isn’t about death. For us as young people, death is a far-off rumor with an import never understood until you can figuratively see the whites of its eyes, and the realization it is inevitable takes a little of the sting out of the realization it might be here. And we hope it’s happening is a peaceful event.

But…does it sound like fun wondering if Age-Related Macular Degeneration (AMD) will eventually make you blind and unable to curse the Yankees? Or if a small muscle in the anus (the sphincter) will stop working and make diapers a part of your old age fashion? Is “dribbling” in your future? (Look it up, but for the “non-sports” definition.) Will the bad kind of plaque (Oxford’s good definition: “an ornamental tablet, fixed to a wall in commemoration of a person or event.”) render all these worries moot? Cognitive impairment: a blessing in disguise? Who knew? Even worse, under a certain age who ever thought about it?

Death, then, is not feared as much as slowly, incrementally, dying.

As young people we may have accepted the inevitability of death, but did anything or anyone ever prepare us for the inevitability of “dying”, losing parts of ourselves as if on some sinister, sad, stupid schedule? And without “lots more time to live”?

Give me death when it’s my time but please, fate, stop chipping away at life. I’ll die in peace, without complaint, if God will let me, but if there are other plans, that “schedule”…I’d rather not know.

Crap. That means avoiding old folks who want to talk about it.

Eh. I can live with it. At least until the damn beta-amyloid builds up.**

** Hope you researched the correct “plaque”.