A month before my sixty-fifth birthday, I dreamed I attended my own funeral.
It wasn’t just for me. A beloved janitor at my college had also died. He and I stood inside a pristine dumpster, apparently scrubbed to a meticulous shine out of respect for the dead. Evidently even in death, the college had standards. I was both the subject of the funeral and a witness to it, simultaneously dead in the receptacle and standing with the other attendees observing my disposal.
The aching sadness of the dream was undeniable, and it followed me into the morning as I tried to restore normal operations with coffee, oatmeal, writing, and piano practice. None of it worked. I felt sad and scared.
Seeking consolation, I looked at some titles on my Amazon wishlist: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older; Susan Moon’s Alive Until You’re Dead: Notes on the Home Stretch and This Is Getting Old: Zen Thoughts on Aging with Humor and Dignity; Catherine Bradbury’s This Way Up: Old Friends, New Love, and a Map for the Road Ahead.
Seeing these titles depressed me even more.
I was reminded of 2010. I was forty-eight and overwhelmed with having twins. There were parenting podcasts everywhere. I couldn’t bear them. I was already living the struggle of parenting. The last thing I wanted after a day of actual parenting was to put on headphones and listen to two cheerful people discuss the challenges of parenting.
The same thing happened during my forty years of teaching college writing. I never developed much tolerance for writing conferences, teaching podcasts, or education seminars. I was already teaching. I didn’t have room in my brain for shop talk and inspirational tidbits about connecting with my students. Occasionally I allowed some external pedagogy to sneak through the back door. I’m not above teaching the Sandwich Paragraph Structure. I have standards, but I also have bills to pay.
And now death, aging, and retirement have generated their own industry. There are books, podcasts, YouTube channels, retreats, coaches, maps for the road ahead, instructions for the home stretch, and presumably somebody somewhere offering a twelve-week seminar on embracing your authentic elder self.
It is all too on the nose.
I’d rather approach death indirectly. I want to sneak up on it and surprise it. I want to be the agentive force, not the other way around.
Good luck to me.
Part of the problem is that while I believe in having a purpose and maintaining a positive attitude toward life’s final chapters, conversations about these matters quickly become infested with clichés and saccharine encouragement. Find your purpose. Practice gratitude. Embrace the journey. Age with intention. Become the sage.
Apparently death becomes less alarming if you surround it with enough inspirational nouns.
There is no panacea, formula, podcast, or twelve-step plan that removes the sting from your final chapters. Mortality remains stubbornly unimpressed by branding.
Being old reminds me of a bunch of boomers attending a Rolling Stones concert. The band members themselves are around eighty, and now they’re playing the final encore. Do you stay and savor every remaining moment?
That sounds good on paper.
In reality, you’re already thinking about the parking lot.
The concert peaked about an hour ago. If you stay until the final note, twenty thousand other people will stampede toward the exits at precisely the same moment. Then comes the parking structure. Then comes traffic. You can already see yourself trapped behind a Suburban containing six other boomers discussing their statins.
So you leave early.
You hear “Satisfaction” beginning behind you as you make your way toward the exit, congratulating yourself on your strategic brilliance.
This impulse has an equivalent in aging. Call it Exit Anticipation: the tendency to begin psychologically withdrawing from life because you have become acutely aware that the event is approaching its conclusion.
You know the peak is probably behind you. You know the concert cannot continue indefinitely. And once you start thinking about the exit, it becomes increasingly difficult to concentrate on the music.
A sense of futility creeps in. Why start another project? Why buy another piano? Why make another friend? Why write another book? Why become deeply invested in anything when the ushers are already stacking chairs in the back of the auditorium?
Exit Anticipation whispers that perhaps you should begin disengaging now. Get ahead of the crowd. Beat the traffic.
It is a dark impulse, but denying it seems more dangerous than acknowledging it. You need to know that the impulse exists precisely so that you don’t obey it automatically. Otherwise, you can spend years leaving a life that hasn’t ended.
That may be one of the peculiar psychological challenges of aging. The knowledge that the concert will end can interfere with your ability to hear the music that is still playing.
My dream understood this before I did.
There I was, looking at my own body inside a meticulously sanitized dumpster, attending the final ceremony of my existence.
Did I stay until the end?
Of course not.
I wanted to beat the crowd.
I wanted to beat the traffic.
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