Living with mortality

Jean-Luc Picard, starship captain who
knows a thing or two about mortality.

We live with our mortality, we just don’t think about it very often.

It’s the in-your-face reminders that put our mortality top of mind and, for those moments, make getting older difficult for Baby Boomers.

Two examples were in my face this week, both involving former co-workers at a Massachusetts newspaper company where I worked for many years.

I went to the wake and funeral of one of those co-workers. He was my age, of my sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll generation. He engaged in two of the three to the max and still managed a long career at the paper before lung cancer killed him.

We say to ourselves: That can’t happen to me. I’m different, we say. I take care of myself, we say. Yet, in the seeming randomness of it all, it can happen to us -- to any of us.

It was at the wake that I learned that another co-worker is battling a brain tumor.

Here is someone, while older, took care of himself, was active in retirement, has good medical care.

And yet - the tumor, the seeming randomness of it all.

Certainly, we prefer the more pleasant in-your-face reminders that we’re getting older:

When our kids have grown-up jobs. When our kids get married. When our kids buy their first house. When our kids start having our grandbabies.

In those cases, when we get up in the morning, we can still see the 20 and 30 year old behind the lines in our faces.

When we get up in the morning for the funeral of a former co-worker the same age, we see every line, wrinkle and fissure for what it is - a path to mortality.

It’s how we walk that path that determines how we live with it.

We can’t run from it. We need to come to terms with it in whatever way helps ease the journey.

I take my cue from, of all people, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard of the starship USS Enterprise.

In the 1994 movie “Star Trek: Generations” he speaks to his first officer, William Riker:

“Someone once told me that time was a predator that stalked us all our lives. But I rather believe that time is a companion who goes with us on the journey — reminds us to cherish every moment because they'll never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we've lived. After all, Number One, we're only mortal.”