A darling daughter of mine once remarked, “The last thing your parents teach you is how to die.”
What I had just told her, from the vantage point of my sixties, was that the day dawns when you no longer care what a particular part of your body looks like; you only care whether or not it continues to function.
What I told her more recently is that you learn, to a large degree, to no longer care about much of anything.
I’m not talking about depression; I have never loved life more. I’m not talking about insensitivity; I still care passionately about some things, like my children and grandchildren. But there’s a whole very-long list…lazily meandering off into invisibility as is slips over the horizon…of things that used to concern me deeply that I no longer even bother to notice.
Perhaps it’s death-row mentality. Does an inmate waiting for lethal injection worry about the paint chipping off the cell wall? Maybe it’s just so many decades lived that I’ve finally really learned when emotion is pointless. I can still engage in fiery, adrenaline-fueled, epic battle with the idiots who yet again failed to fix my laptop/washing machine/you-name-it, yet now I walk away…even if I lost that particular battle…in a state of complete calm, smiling softly when I hear a bird chirp, because, ultimately, I don’t give a shit.
This is, even if I am on death row, a freedom that slips me right through those bars and allows me to soar above it all.
