Dead by 50
When a plan does not come together. Now what?
Don’t worry about marriage being forever. He’ll be dead by fifty, your two kids will be adults, you’ll still be young enough to date and he’ll have left you a large life insurance policy.
That was the plan anyway. Too bad he lived a decade longer than planned and is showing no signs of dropping dead any time soon. He still has a full head of hair and all his teeth. Never had a heart attack and has a resting pulse rate of 69bpm, blood pressure of a 30-year old.
Oops. Now what are you gonna do?
“I can’t wait to be rid of this ill-fitting meat sack I’ve been dragging around with me my entire life,” he said, unprompted. “It’s ugly, too fat in the wrong places and hurts from the inside out.”
Why bother if he’s gonna be dead in a few years anyway.
He is in everybody’s way. It’s probably time he just took the nearest off-ramp and quit causing trouble for everybody.
He suspects he spends more time wanting to be with people who would rather he not be there. The concept of spending time with loved ones assumes they also love you, but he’s never sure they do. He has nothing of value they want, much less need. He is in their way, an annoyance they are forced to deal with.
His doctors write in their notes that he is angry. He reads them, almost obsessively, on his MyChart but they got it wrong. He’s scared and bored and lonely, but he is not angry. He wonders if the world sees him as just another angry old man.
He fixes his face.
“When is it ok to say I’ve lived long enough,” he muses to nobody. “Is it ever ok? What about hope… Hope for what? What if every tomorrow will be the same as today, the great expanse of nothing happening?”
Just… existence. He’s told that should be enough, but it doesn’t feel like that is true.
The trees are starting to bud and he has already mowed his yard once this Spring, earlier than he has ever done. He keeps records — journals of mowing dates, when those shrubs were planted, when the furnace was last repaired, when the plumbers last came out to snake the drains — because his memory has become unreliable. There are no life events to measure the mundane against anymore now that the kids have grown and flown.
Are the shrubs really fourteen years old? That can’t be true; he just planted them when his daughter pulled up daily in her little truck. Has she really been gone living her life without him for that long?
Fourteen years.
Five thousand, one hundred and eighteen days of just existing. How did he endure when staring into a future of another day seems unbearable.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “Are you ok?”
“Yeah, just a little cold… thinking “ he lies, wondering if she knew how deeply he was lying. If she did, she didn’t let on.
He needed to either be fine or dead. The in-between was too uncomfortable to bear.
I understand this. Learned every one is a statistic of just one.
Life turns on a dime, not on schedule.
When so much of the world revolves around the feel-good, you-can, go-get-em-champ way of looking (or pretending to look) at the world, it's refreshing to read something that climbs into the real mud of life, even if we're not 100% on board with the perspective.