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10/5/97
COMMENTARY: 60 years old, and I'm still here - both regretful and thankful
By BRIAN DICKINSON
I'VE BEEN NOTICING that anniversaries of signal events in one's life carry a curiously double message.
Any personal anniversary offers a natural occasion for remembrance, stock-taking, summing-up and (usually) conviviality. The yearly arrival of a specific calendar date, although certain and predictable, tends to alert one, like a distant doorbell's buzz. Even if we are disinclined to stir a fuss about such days, the mere arrival of the date on the calendar gives us a little jolt - Surprise! Guess what day this is! - that invites us to reminisce and even indulge in nostalgia.
Yet anniversaries can also bring on the deepest of emotional twinges, especially as our years accumulate. Such celebratory events as a college reunion, while rekindling memories of "the old days," inevitably draw us into peering ahead, toward that shadowy future occasion when we shall be no longer around. We may do this peering furtively, and it may be for only an instant, but we cannot easily avoid the flicker of recognition of our own mortality that such commemorations bring.
This split awareness can be particularly acute when birthdays come around, as the measure of our years alive climbs to a most improbable number. Since few of us enjoy musing on our own inevitable death, we dispel the unspeakable fact. We celebrate. We party. We rejoice in the presence of kinfolk and friends, thereby affirming a kind of universal immortality. And even the agnostics among us can hardly fail to feel grateful for the gift of life.
These clumsy musings come from a birthday anniversary of my own the other day. I became 60. Incredible! How can this be? Why, only yesterday I was riding my bike, delivering the afternoon newspaper, raking leaves, going to high school dances, or smashing tennis balls around for hours, oblivious to the sweltering August heat of central Missouri. Ah, those Missouri summers. In the summer after high school, I had a job tending plants in a greenhouse - endless beds of chrysanthemums, carnations, roses. That summer our porch thermometer touched 110 for three days straight. What a memory!
In those days I would have hooted at anyone who dared to suggest that I might someday attain the age of 60. Oh, I understood the natural progression of aging, and quietly hoped that I would reach 60 and even well beyond, but I could not imagine how I would look at that advanced age - how my voice might sound, or how my values might have shifted over the decades. Any idea that I would see three fine sons grow to manhood would have seemed most unlikely. And absolutely nothing in my first 50 years of living could have prepared me for the image of myself at age 60, completely paralyzed and voiceless, confined to a wheelchair by an irreversible nerve disease.
But: Here I am, five years along in a truly devastating illness, and I'm pleased to be among you. What has changed? How is it that I, now well along in the latter stages of my life, can accept this constricted interval without stumbling into dementia?
I am not at all sure how this can be, but one reason has to be the love of family and loyal support of friends. I could not easily keep up the fight if I were alone. On my 60th birthday some friends dropped in to help us celebrate, and it proved to be a lively, upbeat occasion. Folks clearly enjoyed themselves, and this gave me a lift and a sense of renewal. No one could miss my motionless form, in a wheelchair parked before a computer array that is my principal means of communication, but that was not the party's dominant image.
To the contrary: Although no one said it in so many words, I felt the gathering to be an emphatic affirmation of life, of the shared experience of living. From that I drew strength.
In the past few years I've been struck again and again by the universality of so much of the human condition. Everyone, it seems, has been touched by misfortune of some kind. Most of us are probably neurotic in one way or another, and are not always eager to share our inner anxieties with others. Yet since becoming ill, I've heard any number of friends air their own private concerns with surprising candor. In a metaphorical sense, they and I become one. I, at least, am strengthened by such exchanges.
Illness, by restricting my present-day world, has sharpened my cultivation of memory. I now have 60 verifiable years of living to draw on, and the tangle of recollections is endlessly entertaining. I am struck by the bewildering variety of things that I have done, beliefs once held and then discarded, reckless acts later regretted, worthwhile risks not taken. Admittedly, such musings are a form of escapism for me, but they offer something else: an expansive perspective on the sweep and continuity of my 60 years.
I am also feeling immense gratitude for the simple glories of living, for the human capacity for an aesthetic, for the empowerment of choice, values and beliefs. For me, these glories outshine the tragedies and terrors that haunt so many lives. Not surprisingly, my illness has compelled introspection, reflection and (if I may) thoughts on the spiritual side of our lives. I suspect that I would have ventured into this area rather less if I had stayed well.
Lest there be any mistake, I am not advocating serious illness as a way to gain a heightened understanding of one's place in the cosmos. I have the deepest regret that my physical self is now so deteriorated. But I'm still here, happy to be so, and thankful to family, friends and medical people who have done so much to help me keep chugging along. Sixty years. That's quite a spell. And I'm still here.
Brian Dickinson is the Journal-Bulletin's editorial columnist.
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