The Final Lap
I sort of knew this was coming. Before most important decisions in my life where finalized I sort of knew what was coming on my part. I learned or sensed or imagined early in life that the right decision, in important matters, is a decision that is right for ourselves. It seems a mistake to let others define us or dictate our personality/values/goals/our station in life/our whatever. These important decisions in life dictated where I went to college, to graduate school, to where I taught at the University level for most of my life, to how I lived retired for 21 years now, and shortly to how I live the last lap of my life—however long that lap might be. I am indebted to my dad for encouraging me to just be what fits me best. He never attempted to steer me down any particular path in life except advise me to just do the right thing for myself and others in an ethical manner.
We have to be careful with how we achieve some contentment. Chasing after contentment is a slippery slope. We need be particularly thoughtful about how we view ethical behavior. For varied reasons I decided by around age 40 that any Heaven is here on Earth during our own lifetime, that there is no Heaven in some sort of afterlife. If good decisions generated good memories, then I made some rewarding decisions in my life. My formative years, my productive years, and my retirement years have all given me a lot of good memories. With a bank of pleasant memories the need to keep up that pace sort of evaporates. When people say to me sometimes: “What do you do for excitement”? I respond: “I am not looking for excitement or tense challenges anymore. Been there, done that, and now I prefer some quietude, solitude, solo walking in nature and city neighborhoods, reading, food for thought via musings, real sumptuous food via cooking, musical favorites from my past, good doctors, pleasant people at a respectable personal distance in my daily life, my FANAFI Fund which enables me to support the less fortunate, and projects within my condo which create the right atmosphere for personal contentment. All this I sense is my personal ‘Heaven on Earth’. Each unique person would need create their own ‘peculiar’ Heaven on Earth.
Trump is, if nothing else, an interesting study. Here is a man who inherited millions, amassed billions via bilking investors, stiffing contractors and then declared bankruptcy—keeping huge amounts of money for himself, and all legal, thanks to the laws which lobbyists of the wealthy have engineered to get on the books. Yet with all this money, and all his bragging about how wealthy he is, his various trophy wives, and how money can buy him anything he wants, Donald Trump is one of the angriest persons around. He is mad at everything and everybody, especially minorities, the poor, the less fortunate of every ilk. Compulsive behavior never leads to contentment. The real tragedy is his compulsive behavior and consequent anger ends up making the lives of so many less fortunate in life more miserable.
Past good memories help immensely in the retirement stage of life, and will provide the needed support during our, however long, last lap. Good health is imperative during our terminational years and for the last 21 years of my terminational years good health has been a blessing. Having sort of intensely observed how a lot of people spent their last lap in life (which is decidedly different than the terminational years), I have a good feeling about the best stage props for my own last lap. Peculiar is perhaps the best word many would use to describe my own essence, although I doubt many would use it in a derogatory manner. Of course being ‘peculiar’ carries some baggage, but it is what it is.
Whether we like it or not, it seems we all die alone. Whether we like it or not ‘we can never go home again.” Every time we hit a button and try to relive the past, we fail. Reunions, in theory, try to recreate the past, but in that respect they fail miserably. They only remind us that the past is gone. The closest I ever succeed in recreating realistic emotions from the past is in the quietude of night or nature. We can, with effort, regenerate some of the intense feelings we had with others in our youth, or with past objects of affection, or with past fellow workers, or our parents, etc. While partial emotions are possible, it can never be the same simply because the past is over, done with, a closed book. That will always be sad fact while we still exist. Unless we die prematurely via an accident, disease, whatever, we will die a ‘death by a thousand cuts’. With each loss of our meaningful past, we die a little ourselves. We move on, travel down new paths until at some point new paths are less rewarding. At that point in our lives we either go gently down the stream, or we make an ass of ourselves trying to swim upstream, or at the very least resist going down stream to the great unknown.
In our last lap, the difference is that our own essence will begin to fade. No one mistakes interacting with someone, say 83 years old, as interacting with the same person at age 20 or 40. I can vividly remember sitting at a dining table with my mother in a facility for the aged in which so much silence permeated the event. These were once vibrant energetic individuals who often never shut up, but now communication was sparse, inane, and required considerable effort. It simply is what it is, with their life ebbing away in slow motion. Though all were kind of in the same boat, some were going gently down the stream and others were constantly whining and fighting battles which could never be won. My mother was too smart to listen to me very often, but I advised her not to whine a lot when the attendants of varied sorts came into her room. She surprised me—she didn’t. These attendants would remark to me, when I was visiting, that it was a pleasure to go into her room. Some would sometimes go to into her room after work and play games with her.
As usual I drift off topic. For 21 retirement years now I have had the opportunity to find ways to amuse myself. A prominent goal was never to be a pest to others by always seeking ways to have them amuse me. I think I learned this from my father. He, to put it succinctly, simply cut himself off from his past, and found ways to amuse himself. He had been all his life socially active with a lot of people, but in his last years he made zero effort to continue contact with them. When I pressed him why he didn’t stay in contact with his former friends he simply responded “What for? You can’t relive the past.”
I have now reached the conclusion that this is the right path for me, just as it was for my father, for Howard Hughes, and for a lot of people who I have known in the past. For me, it is very comforting, that when I wake up each day, I simply do the things I want to do—all, or certainly almost all, of which are not dependent on others. I spent a lot of my time in my productive years doing things which were challenging and rewarding—-BUT involved endless meetings, maneuvering, competing, challenging, and protecting young people who were in tough situations, and vulnerable to failure without assistance (and too often eventually failed anyway). This changed my whole perspective on life and human diversity. I never remotely succeeded to the extent Obama did, in the sense Obama never seemed to meet a group he didn’t want to help succeed. Those with a more restricted sense of humanity hated him for the help and attention he gave those groups whom they, if not detesting, desired little contact with, or to support those different from themselves. Obama’s reward was clearly a kind of contentment depth which most of us can never achieve.
I said earlier in this treatise that we all die alone. So why, I wonder, would I want to drag others through my own dying process? All our lives we needed help from others to achieve many of the successes in our lives, no matter how modest. On our last lap, we are going to die and no one else can prevent it. They could gather around us on a daily basis and nothing would change. What we need are good doctors, good caretakers, comfortable surroundings, and the ability to control our own dying process. Some states are edging in that direction ever so slowly. Modern medicine can often keep us alive in some sort of tortured state for longer and longer periods of time, at a cost that is astronomical. In my case, a peculiar dude of harmless nature, when I have had enough, whenever that time arrives, I am prepared to peacefully die via my own actions if necessary. That comforts me. There is no reason to fear dying, just what kind of dying torture we might be forced to go through by the government and certain religious groups.
During the last lap of life I think it best to seal myself off from all except those involved in my daily life, and even those will be kept at a safe distance. So far it seems I am getting the necessary pattern set up for achieving this goal. It just seems we need keep an accurate assessment as to what we can still do and what we can no longer do. Never let others do what we can still do ourselves. There are plenty of kind enough people who will do things for us that we can still do ourselves, but at an age when we can linger so much longer in life, this burden on others is simply wrong. IF we can no longer care for ourselves and do any of the things we use to do for an enjoyable life, why do we want to be a burden to others? If we are going to recover that is one thing, but if not, well—like already stated, death is nothing to fear. We didn’t exist for millions of years in past evolutionary eras and we never lost any sleep with regrets over it. And the fact is, once dead we certainly cannot have any feelings whatsoever about future evolutionary periods. No one is turning over in their grave about anything after their death. No one fears going to bed because they will know nothing about the time period in which they are asleep.
The emotion which should dominate the final lap is one of gratefulness. We were born by chance and we should be grateful we had that chance:
“A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.
And among that billion minus one
Lincoln, another Obama, T.O., a new Ira Louvin—
But the One was Me.”
Once dead we are not totally nonexistent yet. But once all have died with memories of our existence, then finally we cease to exist. In the big picture of God’s evolutionary process, our existence was no big deal, no matter how hard we tried all our lives to make ourselves important. We even tried to believe that our immediate offspring were duplicates of ourselves, a continuation of our own essence. That also is rather farcical. If we were to put 100 parents who we knew well in a room, and then put 100 adult immediate offspring who we knew well in a room, our ability to match up the right offspring with the right parents, in the absence of any physical resemblance would be a colossal failure. Diversity is a driving force in the evolutionary process, never our own essence.
My last lap has not yet started but my plan is to be prepared.
“The clock of life is wound but once
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop,
AT late, or early hour.
Now is the only time you own.
Live, love, and toil with a will.
Place no faith in tomorrow,
For the clock may then be still.”
For the most part, those in their last lap of life turn inward and withdraw from all that much interest in others. When pushed they will try to be respectful about all the activities others are going through in their lives, but left on their own in group settings they tend to become the silent ‘elephant in the room’, managing a nod here and there, a smile when pushed to smile, but their mind is inward and fading. With a substantially decreased energy level they appreciate sleep the best. I often get the impression they are ready to go into retreat mode, but others try their best not to let them. We may wish that people who were once so important to our lives not die alone, but they will. That, of course, is not to say they don’t need a comfortable environment to die alone. Actually we were born alone without the slightest clue or appreciation of any others present. We kind of die the same way whether we are dying from a car accident, a deadly disease, a deadly medical condition, whatever. Probably the fairest thing we can do for those on their last lap is enquire if there is anyone they want to see and limit any visitors to that list. Many of these round the clock vigils meet the need of the visitors, not the dying patient. This is not to suggest these vigils are wrong. Just like funerals are for the living survivors, these death bed vigils are likewise similar. Many species prefer to die alone, and when possible, go off somewhere to die. Yes, life itself can end up being a nuisance on the final lap, and our mental activity so weak and inane that if we could suddenly recover, we would not even remember much of that final lap.
My dad, well into his 80’s, once remarked to me “I feel ok but what is the point?” There seemed to be no real answer to his question. Perhaps the terminational years is our ‘Heaven” if we choose to make it so. Statistics show that those past 60 tend to have a more contented life than those in earlier years. My own feelings attest to that. But I also sense that my last lap will go smoother if I prepare ahead. It amazes me when some older person hits their last lap and is in a dither about the turn of events as if it were a total unexpected surprise. Did they really think they would be immortal? In the next few months my intention is to prepare and thus be prepared. Things could turn south at any time. So I guess this is part one. Many would say it is morbid to think about, or plan for one’s final lap. Frankly, death is about as any for sure part of life that we can plan on. Those who plan carefully important events in their life are more likely to have such events go well. These events include college plans, marriage, career plans, potential job situations, ethical beliefs and the rewards, tolerance to diversity, personal priorities, personal values, etc. More to the point, if we do not prepare to face our final lap, we often find that trying to prepare ourselves, as it happens, may well find us not in the best mental state at such a time. Of course, given the choice, we would rather just drop dead, but we are more likely to slowly fade away—albeit we can, at some point, when enough has become enough, elect to simply drop dead in a dignified painless timely fashion. Part two, if there is one, will be the game plan for my final lap. |
