In Passing, A Meander

With the deaths of Bowie and Rickman within the week, hard not to pause, to take stock—if only momentarily. Both were 69, both died from cancer. Both of their lives ran parallel with mine, embedded in the culture, in movies that I watched, in music that I heard.

David Bowie stepped into the limelight as I finished high school and began college. I was in my mid-30s when Alan Rickman became a face and name to most of us with Diehard. The rest, as they may say about both men, is now history.

Coincidentally, at breakfast yesterday, I told a younger friend about a mortality test I took online—not being morbid, just curious. The hundred questions covered lifestyle and family history, current and past ailments, and illnesses and diseases.

The results gave me a 1 in 4 chance of not making it to 72, but a 75% chance of seeing 77, and then 1 in 4 odds of seeing 82, which is what the Social Security Administration calculates for me. On this matter, I become a fan of optimistic governmental projections.

Of course, the only way to really play it is to see tomorrow when you see tomorrow. Not how we live our lives. The daily exercise of living seems to demand otherwise. Appointments, a rendezvous, deadlines—and, people, I am not quite 6 years into a 30-year-refi.

The higher number—the 20 years perhaps—is just far enough out from today timewise to be in the arena of the abstract. But, I think back, and I have done 20 years three times already. And how many times do we look back and say of some event incredulously “Was it that long ago?” and shake our heads.

Twenty years ago Alan Rickman was in Michael Collins. Your cue: “Really? Was it that long ago?” Maybe dredging up A. E. Housman’s poetic lament that 50 springs with cherry trees blossoming are not enough is not such a good idea. The poem was published when he was 37. He died 40 years later.

The lower projection, to have a decade or less, is of course sobering, but not worth dwelling on beyond a shrug of the shoulders. Not being cavalier, just exercising common sense. Life is moment to moment, but who has time for that. Ten more birthdays, maybe less, is a count that my fingers may account for if so.

Of course, we have a vital stake in a future that comes one tick of the clock at time. Sure, I intend to cut back the roses in the next couple of weeks. Take the lantana to the ground. Feed the trees in six weeks. Spring, you know.

However, I am a longstream-ist at heart. The invention of writing is pegged at around 5200 years ago. Was it…seems like…that long ago?

So I am but a flickering. I am afloat on the current of time that flows steadily along regardless of whether or not I sit and dawdle in the garden or wait in the checkout line at the grocery store. Whether I am speeding along in my 10-year-old truck at 70 mph or listening to Bowie sing “Heroes” released almost 39 years ago. Yep, 39, that’s right.

What I do know—or what do I know? We come, we go. Timestamp TBA.