I'll be graphic. Just as you got over the ick of going down there and doing that to someone (and don't lie. You were 12 once), get over your biases about elderly love and sex and you're imbecilic aversion to other people's wrinkles. Get over the "Eeewww!" will you? Unless you take a gun to your head right now, or employ some other method of offing yourself, you're going to get old. And then you're going to die. What happens after that is anybody's guess. Comfort yourself, dry your tears, do whatever you must, but damn it, come to terms with it and stop treating older people--and yourself--so badly. And for fucksake face the fear and stop letting it cripple your spirit.
The past year has been one long lesson in accepting my own aging. I'll turn 62 this year, a fact that I really have a hard time accepting because I feel like I lost a decade and-a-half when I was caretaking each of my parents in their turn. Life feels short so far, because I have no idea where my late-40's and 50's went. It's hard to feel my actual age due to my health issues as well, but actually, aside from two incurable "conditions" that are a direct result of those hard years, I'm in great health. There's no reason for me to think that I won't live at least 30 more years. There are a lot of people in their 80's and 90's who are still vital and active, and still working toward their goals. Hell, Ravi Shankar died recently at the age of 92 only four weeks after giving his last concert. I remember Maestro Salazar telling me once that his wish for dying was to be in the middle of conducting Beethoven's 9th Symphony when he went. He very nearly got that wish.
It's time for me to stop the partying. After all, I've been doing that for 30 years. I need to concentrate the next 30 on my creativity, not on hangovers and depression from my serotonin being gobbled up. I've out-partied all of my friends anyway. What did I prove? I can't do it anymore and I'm ready to face that and accept it. I'm aging and there's nothing I can do that will take me back to age 32.
So can we as a society just grow the hell up and get over it? Can we at least try? Seventies songwriter/recording artist Emitt Rhodes wrote,
"You must live till you die,
You must feel to be alive."
How can we really live if we continually and habitually refuse to face the only absolute truth there is? The truth that we have been aging since our conception, that we will continue to age, and we will die. Everything else is just a collective hunch.
