i’m finally cool with death
This is an excerpt from the journalist Peter Richmond’s Substack, Peter’s Newsletter. For the full article, please click here.
After a long lifetime of being regularly up close and personal with it, of fearing it, resenting it, and being terrified by it, Death and I have become friends. Time and experience have finally stripped it of its terror, its threat, its dread, even its panic-inducing “What the fuck is an eternal void?” thing. Put another way, I’m cool with him at last (Death has to be a He, right?).
Not that I have even the slightest desire to meet the guy. I would gladly settle for 72 more years to pursue any number of new vocations: Tagging otters, say, for MassWildlife. Playing second trombone in the Buffalo Philharmonic. Trying my luck as a painter of the Cubo-Futurist school c. 1918. Designing radical sports stadia.
And while we’re at it, okay, I could also use another seven decades to finally really experience the power of the “nature” I missed out on until recently, being before that obsessed with finding literary fame, journalistic fame, authorial fame and fame in general, as long as it involved me. That it took me seven decades to finally have conversations with the crows in our trees, or to marvel at the crayfish nibbling my feet in my favorite secret stream in the woods, seems sort of unfair, but all that beauty is enhanced by the temporariness—of nature, and now, of me.
Once when I was interviewing the late former owner of the Baltimore Orioles during the 21-game losing streak to start the 1988 season, he told me the story of the Persian king who’d told his wisest monks to go into the mountains and not come back until they’d come up with the wisest thought ever. It was, “This, too shall pass.”
That’s me. I’ve come to pleasant terms with how my time here has passed. I might have experienced just about every emotion life has to offer, and I think I’m pretty full. I don’t really need anything more from Here and Now. I ran the table with what it had to offer, for better or worse. For sure there was more better than worse.
Part of why I’m cool with whatever’s next is that I lived it well, according to Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant, whose psych department regularly interviewed a few hundred men in the Boston area over the course of their entire lifetimes, then gave George the data. He coded it, looking for common attributes of the men who reached their eighties on top of their world, and wrote “Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life from the Landmark Study of Adult Development.”
Vaillant’s number one commonality was having one long-term relationship. We’ve been married now for 43 years and neither of us are going anywhere soon. So, check the big one.
But my favorite Vaillant guidepost was that the men who’d aged gracefully had taken a divergent “work” path at some point, taking a new trail that wasn’t far removed from the previous lifelong pursuit, but a definite re-routing. As Vaillant said, paraphrasing here, “If you get up in the morning at the age of 65 still wanting to be the best at what you do, you’ve missed the point of living.”
In my case, it was getting an MA in Teaching at 65, and teaching in the college’s Education Department, but mostly absorbing the life force of college students for five years, thereby taking years off my own ossified brain lobes. I was no longer taking in the world and rearranging it to sell in written words, but regaining a passion for learning again. It all really was a tremendously satisfying second act.
As to the science/philosophy/religion about the nature of the place where I’m heading after Death herds me with a scythe through his portal? Please. Using a human-being mind’s three-dimensional, linear-time skill set, I’m supposed to be able to understand or envision the everythingness of everything? My brain’s inability to remotely conceive of what happens next is what makes me so relaxed about it. How can you fear the unknowable?