I celebrated my 75th birthday this week with mixed emotions.
On the one hand, Terry organized a surprise dinner for me that brought 15 available family members to a bountiful table filled with tasty offerings in our Almonte home. And throughout the week, dozens of friends posted on my Facebook page, wishing me congratulations and good tidings for the next year.
It’s amazing that in my lifetime, I have been blessed to meet and know people who have made a significant impact on my life, making me more sensitive to the cultures they embrace or the decisions and choices they make. Through them, I have become more knowledgeable about the world around me and more sensitive of the need to be tolerant and accepting of that which makes us different.
On the other hand, I’m feeling old for the first time in my life. I retired from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police at the age of 54, seamlessly, then worked on Canadian government contracts and as a law enforcement adviser in Southeast Asia, off and on, for 15 years. And while the arrival of COVID brought any thought of employment to a screeching halt, the phone again rang with a post-pandemic work-from-home dream job that ended with the new Canadian government’s austerity measures. I don’t like being unemployed.
My friends are dying, and I feel vulnerable. Decades ago, when a disease or an accident took a friend or colleague before their time, it was a sad event, but not one that I felt personally connected to. In my mind, I was “bulletproof”, even when, at the age of 50, I got cancer myself. I remember focusing on the 70% chance of recovery rather than the 30% chance of death.
Vulnerability crept up on me in subtle ways. I restrict my ladder climbing height to three steps, am careful when shovelling anything, but huff and puff just getting up from the floor. And colleagues that I have worked with and depended upon for my safety and security are going more rapidly in recent years.
My father lived to the age of 95, and periodically, he would remark that he was the last person living of his group of friends. When he said and repeated that fact, I processed the information abstractly. Then, I judged the comment to be an evident remark. Now I understand that it was voiced in recognition of the approaching inevitability of the end of life that we all face.
The reality of that hit me when I saw the floating seven and five balloons behind my dining room chair at my birthday celebration.
So I need to process this. Quickly.
I need to remind myself that in spite of the fact that my toaster has a longer warranty than that left in me, and that my trip hazards continue to multiply, I am in good physical shape….. for my age. I’m golfing, able to open our back-yard pool in the Spring, and I am playing pickleball three times a week.
So I will meet this challenge of growing old and focus on the 70% chance of aging like a fine wine, rather than the 30% chance that it will turn to vinegar. And when my resolution falters, I will play a song by Toby Keith, may he rest in peace, whose lyrics read:
“I ain’t as good as I once was
I got a few years on me now
But there was a time, back in my prime
When I could really lay it down
I ain’t as good as I once was, but I’m as good once
As I ever was.”