60

as my milestone birthday approaches, i think about what i'm leaving behind

I’m going to be 60 in August and I’ve been thinking about death.

Well, to be fair, I’m always thinking about death. It’s a hallmark of my anxiety disorder. I think about how, when, where. I think about it at three in the afternoon and four in the morning. But I’ve been thinking about it more lately, and not in terms of car accidents or plane crashes, but of the natural end of life.

The life expectancy in the United States is 78 years. That means, if I go out naturally, I’ve still got about 20 years left in me. That’s a long time. But it’s not as long as I’ve been alive and I’ve got less time in front of me than I have behind me. It’s a sobering thought, the idea that you are going to die someday, and I’ve been dwelling on it. I feel everything sort of closing in on me, a storm cloud pressing down, changing the atmosphere so much it sometimes makes me lose my breath. My days are numbered. The end is nigh. Etc., etc.

I see articles all the time about families who pressed their elderly relatives to write down or record their histories. These families now have a rich record of life through decades, stories memorialized, history preserved.

What if I started doing that now, I thought? Now, while my memory is intact and while I have the energy to do it. And then I realized: I don’t have much to say.

I’ve lived life from afar. 60 years of looking in, of watching people live daring lives before me. 60 years of watching history unfold but not taking part in it, 60 years of observing, watching, but not doing.

I don’t know what I’d talk about if a microphone was put in front of me and my kids asked me to tell all. Do I tell them about the no-nukes rallies I went to in high school? Do I tell them what life was like during the 60s and 70s and 80s, regale them with tales of bellbottoms and bicentennials and bopping to new wave music? It all seems so ordinary. I could relive history for them, but that’s all out here, at their fingertips. What personal stories do I have to tell? What interesting things happened to me?

I have always lived on the periphery of things, choosing to stand aside and watch rather than join in. I’m quiet by nature, an outsider by my own circumstances, prone to anxiety when confronted with too many people at once. I’m fearful to a fault. I’ve never been skydiving. I’ve never climbed a rock, much less a mountain. I’ve never run a marathon, I’ve never cheated death.

I don’t exactly have an empty plate behind me; I have gone places, I have done things. But they’re all personal events to me, nothing anyone is interested in hearing. No one wants to see your vacation slides from Barcelona. No one wants to hear about the hockey games you went to in Canada. Those stories are passive, photo albums passed around to bored company at a quiet cocktail party.

60 years. What have I done? I finished a novel that sits on my computer, cursor blinking after the words “the end,” asking me what’s next. That’s the biggest accomplishment of my life, and it’s only a half accomplishment, really. I had two kids I raised to adulthood in a haphazard fashion. I have a few failed marriages under my belt. I’ve left a trail of things I started and never finished; college, careers, projects, books.

Yet, I’ve had a good life. It’s in the context of aging that it all seems so bleak and uninteresting. I want to say I’ve done things. I want to look back and think I’ve left a colorful trail. I don’t want to be on my deathbed, sighing at all I let pass me by. The concerts I didn’t go to because of my crowd anxiety, the family functions I backed out of because socializing is hard, the events I missed because it was all just too much to handle and I’d rather be home, reading a book or watching a movie or petting my dog.

What do I tell my children later on when I’m nearing that life expectancy and they want to know my history? Do I tell them the little stories, the things you’d put in a fancy scrapbook and stick on a shelf where all your memories go? Will they care about that no nukes rally I attended in high school or my recollection of the Challenger disaster?

I have other people’s memories. I could tell you about the summer of ’77 with the blackout and Son of Sam and disco, but they would be someone else’s stories, things I experienced vicariously. But maybe my kids would like those stories, and the stories that followed in the years. Maybe as I’m sitting in a rocking chair on my porch at some ripe old age, they’d like to hear about how a 15 year old me discovered the Ramones, or the 23 year old me who worked in the record store.

60. I had no real troubles with 30, 40, 50. But 60 seems like something else. It feels old. It feels worn. It’s just a number, they say. And while I look younger than my years, and I don’t really feel old or worn, that number sticks in my head, larger than life. I’m on the other side of something and I don’t know what I’m going to do on this side to make things count. I have lived my entire life from afar, like everything I’ve experienced was through a View-Master toy, a whirr and a click and scene after scene of someone else’s pictures.

Perhaps I’m doing myself a disservice, looking at my life through the lens of nothingness. I have 6,500 photos in my flickr account. Surely they are of something. I glance through the albums and I see: beaches, carnivals, friends, Memphis, Lake Tahoe, Barcelona. I’ve been places. I’ve done things. But are they things worth jotting down for generations that come after me to read about?

Death stares me down. It’s not imminent, it’s not, barring a tragedy of some sorts, in my immediate future. Hell, I just refinanced a house with a 30 year mortgage. But it’s there, looking at me, raising its eyebrows, hinting at the future. “What are you going to do with your time left?” it says to me, and I retreat to my couch and my books and my movies. “Nothing,” seems to be the answer.

How do I change that at 60? How do I start really living? How do I push away the anxiety that plagues me so I can fully enjoy the life I have left? I don’t have the answers. Just the questions.

I used to spend my birthdays in California, eating dinner on the water in Lake Tahoe, feeling like life was grand. But that’s gone now. Instead, I’ll be spending my birthday in August in Rhode Island with my sisters, doing fun things, maybe visiting the zoo, taking in the sunrise on the water, just enjoying myself.

I’ll tell my kids about it when we get home. It’s a start.