Catadromy

Recently, I saw an interview with Linda Ronstadt, whom I have loved for years. From afar, of course. Although I’ve been to her concerts and purchased her albums, we’ve never met. Love her, just the same.

She has Parkinson’s Disease and her crystal-clear soprano is stilled forever. She said in the interview that she can’t even sing in the shower. One other thing she said in the interview really stuck with me. The interviewer asked her if she was afraid to die. She replied that she wasn’t afraid of dying; she was afraid of suffering.

I am a devoted reader of the paid obituaries in the New York Times, as I’ve posted before. I take note of the ages of the ‘honorees’, read a few salient details of their lives and move on. Lately, though, I’ve noticed a very disturbing trend. I see the ages of the deceased (or figure them out, based on birth year) and realize they weren’t that much older than I am currently. I think, well, he was [this age], he had a good run. Then I do a bit of math and realize he was only 10 or 12 years older than I am now. Ten years is the blink of an eye to me now. The thought that I only have 10 years left on this earth is dismaying, to say the least. I still have goals, I have things I want to do, accomplish. I have a bucket list that’s not finished!

Time is a river—a metaphor that means time flows only forward. When I was younger, time stretched out before me in an endless stream, uninterrupted by any ordinary concerns. Marcel Proust famously insisted that the remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were. But I’m talking about the future and not the past, an appreciably foreshortened future from my perspective.

I’m facing major surgery next month. Perhaps that’s the reason for all this introspection. I’ve always lived too much of my life in my head; it’s not a healthy place to be most of the time. It’s crowded up there with regret, ghosts of memory and lists of things I always mean to do, but never seem to get around to actually doing.

“Do not fear death, but rather the unlived life. You don’t have to live forever. You just have to live.” — Natalie Babbitt

I have always tried to live my best life and to live so as to have no regrets.

As Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George’s character in Little Big Man) so memorably said, ‘Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn’t.’

Hocus Pocus.