Today was my birthday; human beings like to assign significance to events that, outside our need to put things into boxes, put labels on those boxes, and then put the labelled boxes on the shelves in our minds, really have little significance to the world. Dates are human creations that help us track and in some sense fashion a feeling of control.
We like to say "today, I am a year older."
In any case, this year was a "big" one, again owing to the arbitrariness of the way we sort and order the world. I am 55 - officially by some measures a "senior." Of course, 55 is not hugely different from 54 or 56, but as human being have five fingers on one hand, and ten in total, we exist in a base-ten universe, so 55 is seen as more important.
Am I "old" now? Not significantly older than I was yesterday, or even a year ago. Much older than when I wrote my first blog post 17 years ago.
I recently was in a discussion in another virtual forum, where I was asked when I first realized I was getting "old." Well, it’s said that age creeps up on you. In my opinion, this is not correct. Getting old is not something like a car overtaking you on the road.
It just….happens.
The forum offered what I found to be interesting answers, but I can say the first time I really felt like I was ‘getting old’ was when I was 43.
43 is a prime number, so it has no real significance in the way that 30 or 40 or 50 do. 43 was well after I graduated from college, had my first job, first home. It was after I got married and after my son was born.
Whilst all of those things made me fell like an adult, none made me feel old.
The clear, obvious emergence of mortality is the thing that jolted me into the reality of age.
When I was 43 years old, I received news that a friend from college, a good guy named Ben, had been diagnosed with glioblastoma. I am an epidemiologist, and had done some projects in this area, so I was aware of the numbers.
I remember writing here at the time about Ben and his diagnosis:
When our son was a toddler, his favourite book was an illustrated book of Mother Goose rhymes; among them was the tale of a Packet, captained by a duck. The fantastical ship in the story is "laden with pretty things." We read the book through together so many times that it became dog-eared and the binding eventually came apart. Even as a three-year-old, he could repeat the rhymes just by looking at the pictures.
I was thinking about this little rhyme this morning when I read the postings of an old college friend who last night went in for neurosurgery to remove a tumour from his brain. Ben, a classmate of mine, had been on the baseball team with me at Dartmouth as well as a singer in the Dartmouth Aires, a quite competitive a cappella singing group. Ben apparently had a seizure and was admitted to hospital, where the tumour was found.
Like Ben, I am 43 years old - not at terrible risk for mortality, but certainly entering the age where it is becoming obvious that we need to pay attention to our health if we are not already. Personally, I took up running 20 years ago following my first wake-up call - the death of my own father from cancer.
There is a less-than famous quote to the effect that in life, the only ship that is guaranteed to come in is a black one. Rich and poor; famous and obscure; powerful and powerless - we all await the same fate.
I had of course seen death before. As noted, my father died of lung cancer in 1994, when I was still in school. I had a classmate at Dartmouth who shot himself. Another drowned canoeing on the Connecticut River.
When I was in grad school, at one point I considered jumping off a bridge. So death was not really a strange or “old man” concept.
But these were different.
Ben responded to his initial surgery and treatment, but the cancer returned a couple of years later, and he was unable to beat it the second time.
More than a decade has now passed, and in the subsequent years, I’ve obviously gotten older. Age and knee problems have forced me to stop running. My son, then a young kid, grew up and is now in college in another state. My older brother died last year.
All of these make it clear that I am not young now.
But finding out the fate of my friend Ben, whom I remember as a young guy playing first base at Dartmouth was when I was awakened to the fact that I am getting old.
